MA S TER 
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AUTHOR: 


HEBBERD,  STEPHEN  S. 


TITLE: 


THE  NEW  PHILOSOPHY 


PLACE: 


[NEW  YORK?] 

DA  TE : 

[190- 


COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARIES 
PRESERVATION  DEPARTMENT 


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THE 

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PHILOSOPHY 


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S.  S.  HEBBER.D. 

CHESTERFIELD.  ILL. 


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SUPPLEMENT 


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Pliilo^oply 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


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\ 


Preliminary  Observations. 

Let  it  be  well  understood  that  I  do  not  here 
pretend  to  construct  a  new  system  of  philosophy. 
Such  a  construction  will  demand  th^  work  of 
many  thinkers  laboring  throughout  the  present 
century  of  which  I  shall  see  at  best  but  the  bare 
beginning.  My  task  must  be  confined  to  a 
rough  sketching  of  the  point  of  departure  and 
the  general  direction  which  this  philosophic  de- 
velopment must  pursue. 

And  at  the  outstart  let  me  try  to  disarm  one 
or  two  prejudices.  A  distinguished  American 
writer  has  set  it  forth,  almost  as  an  axiom  that 
It  is  a  mere  waste  of  time  to  seek  for  any  really 
new  system  of  metaphysics.  That  is  certainly 
an  amazing  proposition.  Thorough  agnosticism, 
if  not  satisfactory,  is  at  least  intelligible.  Possi- 
bly human  reason  will  finally  determine  to  aban- 
don all  search  for  a  science  of  thought  as  hope- 
less. But  to  a  believer  in  evolution  it  se^ms 
only  foolishness  to  say  that  mankind  is  doomed 
to  forever  pursue  paths  of  thought  which  have 


_^..'\y\jL,-0 


^T> 


a 

Li? 


316 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


317 


been  proved  by  the  experience  of  three  thousand 
years  to  lead  only  to  endless  and  barren  dispute. 
But  there  is  another  kind  of  prejudice  which 
I  am  far  more  anxious  to  disarm.      It  is  that  of 
g-enuine  idealists  who  will    probably    scorn  any 
criticism  of  their  unscientific  methods  as  an  at- 
tack upon  those  eternal  verities  which  idealism 
lias  sought  to  maintain.      Those  verities  are  as 
sacred  to  me  as  to  them.    The  idealistic  tendency 
which  has  been  but  a  mere  undertone  for  the  last 
four  hundred  years,  is  to  be  the  dominant  note 
of  human  development  during  the  present  cen- 
tury and  many  others  to  come.      That,  it  seems 
to  me,  is  fully  proved  in  the  Philosophy  of  His- 
tory.      Criticism  here  is  directed  solely  agamst 
the  idealistic  method  in  times  past— the  method 
of   "Maya,"  of    "transcendental    illusions"    and 
-phenomenality."       This  method  seems  to  sup- 
pose that  certainty  is  a  sort  of  lump  the  more  of 
>vhich  is  subtracted  from  things  seen,  the  more 
there  will  be  to  add  to  things  unseen.      But  that 
is  a  grave  mistake.     All  experience  both  m  the 
CJrient  and  the  Occident  shows  that  the  f^nal  out- 
come of  such  a  process  is  purely  skeptical  and 
pessimistic.    And  it  is  my  hope  to  show  here  that 
what  is  really  valid  and  valuable  in  idealism  can 
be  reached  in  a  better  way,  by  a  strict  inductive 
method  and  without  affronting  the  primary  con- 
victions of  mankind. 

It  would  be  very   desirable  too   to  disarm  the 


natural  prejudice  against  the  seeming  "arro- 
gance" of  the  claims  here  made.  But  that  is 
probably  impossible.  Really,  no  one  can  be  less 
disposed  than  myself  to  pretend  to  any  rivalry 
with  the  great  masters  of  thought,  who  saw  so 
much  amidst  a  darkened  and  generally  pre-sci- 
entific  environment.  But,  nevertheless,  the  old 
metaphysics  is  dead;  in  the  process  of  human  ev- 
olution the  time  has  come  for  a  new  framing  of 
our  fundamental  conceptions;  and  somehow  it 
seems  to  have  devolved  upon  me  to  begin  the 
ATork. 

Assumption  not  the  Basis  of  Thought. 

It  seems  best  to  begin  by  considering  the  chief 
objections  which  have  already  been  urged 
against  the  fundamental  principle  underlying  my 
Philosophy  of  History.  And  first  of  all  it  has 
been  objected  by  an  eminent  educator  and  au- 
thor that  this  principle  amounts  only  to  the  fa- 
miliar truth  that  we  must  assume  a  rational  con- 
nection of  things. 

How  easy  it  is  to  misunderstand!  One  main 
design  of  my  work  was  to  over-turn  this  whole 
theory  of  necessary  assumptions  lying  at  the 
basis  of  thought.  That  theory  has  played  a  great 
part — but  an  evil  one,  it  seems  to  me — in  all 
modern  speculation.  It  has  appeared  in  differ- 
ent shapes,  in  Descartes'  doctrine  of  "innate 
ideas,"  in  the  Scottish  dogma  of  intuitions,  in  the 
Kantian  system  of  a  priori  forms  and  categories. 


318       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

But  in  every  shape  the  theory  fails  to  accomplish 
the  task  for  which  it  was  set.    It  provides  no  sol- 
id basis  of    certainty.       On  the  contrary,  it    dis- 
credits rather  than  guarantees  our  primary  con- 
victions.      To  say  as    Kant  does,  for    instance, 
that  we  are  mysteriously  compelled  by  some  pe- 
culiarity of  our  mental  make-up,  to  believe  cer- 
tain propositions,  is  to  instantly  excite  th«  suspi- 
cion that  these  beliefs  are  only  subjectively  true. 
They  may  be  valid  for  us,  and  still  only  delu- 
sive and  false.       Reason  cannot  b€  really  com- 
pelled except  by  a  reason.       How  vainly  Kant 
himself  struggled  against  this  ''subjectivity"  is 
well  known,  nor  has  any  one  since  his  day  suc- 
ceeded better.       This    curious  wobbling  of   the 
mind  between  "the  phenomenally  true"  and  "the 
ontologically  true,"  between  believing  and  disbe- 
lieving the  same  proposition  at  the  same  time, 
seems  to  be  the  gist  of  modern  philosophy. 

For  more  than  forty  years  this  shuffling  back 
and  forth  between  two  kinds  of  truth  has  seemed 
to  me,  not  only  logically  but  morally  indefensi- 
ble. All  that  time  I  have  sought  to  find  and  elu- 
cidate some  principle  that  would  do  away  with 
these  necessary  assumptions.  Surely  there 
must  be  some  better  criterion  of  truth,  some 
sounder  basis  of  certainty  than  this  motley  crowd 
of  intuitions,  forms  and  categories  for  whose  va- 
lidity no  other  reason  can  be  rendered  than  that 
they  are  compulsory  beliefs.     All  the  more  when 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


319 


it  is  confessed  that  they  are  not  after  all  compul- 
sory but  can  be  easily  set  aside  by  distinguishing 
between  two  kinds  of  truth. 

And  now  it  is  objected  that  this  principle  of 
mine  is  really  nothing  more  than  one  of  these  fa- 
miliar assumptions.     Let  us  see. 

That  fundamental  principle  is  that  all  thinking 
is  a  relating  of  cause  and  effect.  In  other  words, 
causality  is  not  merely  one  among  the  many  cat- 
egories of  reason,  but  is  the  one  implied  in  all  the 
rest  and  from  which  all  are  derived.  It  is  the  es- 
sence of  thought  as  distinguished  from  mere  feel- 
ing. In  fine  every  complete  affirmation  made  by 
the  mind  is,  either  explicitly  or  implicitly,  an  af- 
firmation of  causality. 

Of  course  this  principle  remains  to  be  estab- 
lished. It  is  the  object  of  this  supplement  to  es- 
tablish it — not  deductively,  for  that  would  de- 
mand some  wider  principle  from  which  it  could 
be  deduced,  but  inductively,  by  a  strict  examina- 
tion of  the  various  processes  into  which  thinking 
divides  itself.  But  if  it  can  be  thus  proved,  then 
it  seems  to  me  our  present  object  is  easily 
gained.  We  shall  readily  find  an  indisputable 
criterion  of,  not  merely  subjective,  but  objective 
truth.  The  existence  of  causal  relations  between 
all  objects  of  thought  will  no  longer  be  a  mere 
assumption  hanging  in  the  air  but  a  demonstrat- 
ed truth  supported  by  a  very  simple  and  cogent 
proof. 


320 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


321 


For  if  all  thinking  is  a  relating  of  cause  and 
effect  then  the  denial  of  causality  logically  in- 
volves the  complete  collapse  of  the  whole  think- 
in-  process.      No  matter  in  what  form  you  put 
yo'Lr  denial,  the  same  result  inevitably  follows. 
Do  you  say  that  casuality  is  subjective  and  not 
objective?    The  answer  is  that  both  subject  and 
object  involve  in  essence  the  idea  of  casuality  and 
become  empty  words  when  that  idea  is  cancelled. 
Or  do  you  say  that  causal  relations  do  not  really 
exist?      But  to  exist  is,  as  I  hope  to  show,  to  be 
in  causal  relation  with  somewhat  or  other,  when 
that  relation  is  cancelled,  the  word  existence  has 
lost  its  meaning..      In  fine,  all  propositions  con- 
cerning the  true  or  the  false  would  become  ab- 
surd; for,  as  will  be    shown    when  we  come  to 
treat' of  judgments,  the  essence  of  every  affirma- 
tion is  to  affirm    some  causal   relation   between 
subject  and  predicate.      Thus  the  whole  fabric  of 
thought  would  collapse,  would  fall  into  a  tangled, 
useless  mass  like  a  fabric  of  cloth  from  which  the 
woof  had  been  withdrawn. 

Perhaps  this  proof  will  be  made  clearer  by 
noting  its  parallelism  with  that  mathematical 
kind  of  demonstration  called  a  reductio  ad  ab- 
surdum.  The  geometer  sometimes  proves  his 
theorem  by  showing  that  its  denial  involved  the 
denial  of  some  universally  accepted  proposition; 
for  instance,  that  the  whole  is  greater  than  any 
of  its  parts.      The  demonstration  in  the  present 


case  is  even  more  thorough:  for  the  denial  of 
causality  involves  the  denial  not  merely  of  some 
one  particular  proposition  but  of  all  possible 
propositions  which  the  mind  can  frame.  It  in- 
volves the  extinction  of  thought. 

This  proof  is  as  yet  hypothetical.  It  depends 
upon  the  establishment  of  my  fundamental  prin- 
ciple that  all  thinking  is  a  relating  of  cause  and 
effect.  But  ^ven  now  it  ought  to  be  evident  that 
my  doctrine  is  not  that  of  some  "universal  and 
necessary"  assumption.  It  aims  to  substitute  for 
that  assumption  a  demonstrated  theorem. 

Note  still  further  that  in  this  argument  I  have 
simply  made  explicit  what  has  always  been  im- 
plicit in  the  human  mind.  The  belief  in  caus- 
ality has  always  been  something  more  llian  a 
mere  assumption  supported  by  naught  but  its  al- 
leged irresistibleness.  From  the  beginning  the 
human  mind  has  been  vaguely  conscious  that  the 
denial  of  causality  involved  the  collapse  and  ex- 
tinction of  all  thinking.  But  the  fact  was  not 
proved;  and  therefore  speculation  easily  wander- 
ed off  into  th€  wilderness  of  Kantian  subjectivity, 
etc.  Nor  can  it  be  proved,  I  think,  except- 
through  the  recognition  of  our  fundamental  prin- 
ciple, to-wit,  that  all  thinking  is  unitary,  all  its 
processes  but  more  or  less  developed  forms  of 
relating  cause  and  effect. 

The  Nature  of  Causality. 

A  second  objection  has  been  urged  by  others 


322 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 


and  with  especial  earnestness  by  a  distinguished 
American  writer  who  has  written  several  very 
able  works  from  the  idealistic  point  of  view. 
The  objection  is  that  I  have  confounded  different 
kinds  of  causality. 

To  this  I  answer  that  distinctions  are  worthless 
when  made  at  random  and  without  regard  to  the 
real  unity  underlying  them.     And  one  chief  de- 
fect of  modern  metaphysics  is  that  it  has  blindly 
borrowed  its  distinctions  of  casuality  from  the 
philosophv  of  a  pre-scientif^c  age.       Wonderful 
indeed  is  the  genius  evinced  in  the  Greek  philos- 
ophy ;  especialy  the  idealism  of  men  like  Pythag- 
oras' and  Plato,  belonging  to  a  race   saturated 
with  materialism,  seems    almost    a    miracle  ot 
insight    and  beauty.       But    the    defect  of    our 
modern  speculation  is  that  it  has  been  little  more 
than  a   revamping    of    this    pre-scientific  Greek 
philosophv— the  ghost  of  it,  so  to  speak.    Hence 
our  philosophy  has    never   been    able    to  really 
adapt  itself  to  the  revolution  in  thought  effected 
by  modern  science.       Especially  in  the  present 
case,  it  has  never  risen  above  an  ancient  division 
of  causes  about  as  meritorious  as  the  ancient  di- 
vision of  the  plant-world  into  trees,  shrubs  and 

herbs. 

Hence  I  have  sought  to  subsume  these  con- 
fused distinctions  under  that  one  uniform  type  of 
causality  upon  which  modern  science  so  strenu- 
cuslv  insists.     And  the  terms  best  fitted  to  ex- 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


323 


press  this  common  character  inherent  in  all  caus- 
al relations  seems  to  be — a  relation  of  depend- 
ence. How  readily  the  various  distinctions  be- 
tween causes  can  be  assigned  their  true  value  by 
referring  them  to  this  relation  of  dependence, 
may  perhaps  be  best  shown  by  considering  some 
of  the  aberrations  of  idealism  and  materialistic 
positivism  in  regard  to  casuality. 

(i)  Idealism.  One  of  the  pregnant  errors  of 
idealism  has  been  its  failure  to  note  the  complex- 
ity of  effects.  Let  the  reader  take  this  for  grant- 
ed, or  otherwise  seek  for  the  proof  thereof  given 
in  the  Section  of  this  Supplement  dealing  with 
Perception.  At  present  I  am  interested  only  in 
the  fact  that  effects  arc  exceedingly  complex, 
and  that  therefore  we  have  manv  words  with  va- 
rious  shades  of  meaning  to  denote  certain  differ- 
ences between  the  many  causes  upon  which  a 
given  effect  depends.  Thus  w^e  speak  of  one 
cause  as  the  occasion,  as  the  cause  most  closely 
connected  in  time  with  the  effect.  Others  w^e  en- 
title conditions,  as  being  more  remote  although 
often  more  significant.  And  one  of  these  condi- 
tions which  happens  to  be  the  most  conspicuous, 
we  are  apt  to  designate  as  the  cause.  But  the 
effect  is  dependent  upon  th-em  all,  whether  called 
occasion,  condition  or  cause.  The  shades  of  dis- 
tinction denoted  by  the  different  terms  refer 
merely  to  differences  in  the  combination  of 
causes;  they  do  not  essentially  effect  that  com- 


L 


!  I 


11 


324      THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY, 
show  herealK  .  tne  overlooking 

and  sufficient  cause. 

P..-..,-..-.    But  .e   are   also  con  ron^.d  by 
the  positivist  who  affirms  ^^^^^"^s 
nendence  are  mere  chimeras,  that  science 
^    1        thL  except  the  uniform  succession    of 
Z'^  nothing  excq,  .^  .^  ^^^^^.^,,^  ^^ 

phenomena     /"^  *°^"^^^^  ^^  ^ave  thoroughly 
roSertlHatrof  those  phenomena  con 

_ing  which  th.^  <1^--^^^^ 
have  not  seen  that    every    y       .,     ,     „,  mialitv 
•;„  n„   effect  ■   it   is  some  attribute  or  quality 

maintained  it  can  never  positiv- 

dchcvdcnt  upon  that  thing,      bo  that  me  r 

fst  cal  not  Uke  the  first  step  in  his  scientific  ob- 

^T^t'Ses^h:  Stivist  insist  t-  ahlK^gh  a 
.elation  of  dependence  j"  some  se^e  nu^  t  per^ 
Vians  be    admitted    at    the  start,  \ei    <* 

See  ,„  ,o  <,o  ";'>vrr;,s""d:'»ct 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


325 


science  has  consisted  in  showing  Httle  by  little 
that  every  phenomenon  is  dependent  not  solely 
upon  the  thing  from  which  it  has  been  abstracted 
but  also  upon  a  vast  variety  of  other  things. 
Science  is  insight  into  this  immense  complex  of 
relations  of  dependence. 

The  charge  of  ambiguity  then,  in  my  con- 
ception cf  causality  has  been  more  than  dis- 
proved. Not  only  has  it  been  shown  that  there 
is  no  such  incompatibility  between  the  alleged 
different  kinds  of  causation,  as  would  make  it 
impossible  to  comprehend  them  in  one  genus. 
More  than  that,  it  has  been  shown  that  only 
through  this  generic  or  unitary  view  can  we  at- 
tain to  any  clear  insight  into  the  nature  and  va- 
lidity of  these  distinctions. 

The  real  confusion  and  equivocalness  have 
been  on  the  part  of  the  old  philosophy,  which 
leaving  these  causal  distinctions  wholly  vague 
and  indefinite,  has  simply  flung  them  all  together 
in  a  witches'  caldron  of  dispute  and  paradox. 

Immanent  and  Dynamic  Casiiality.  This  es- 
say is  but  a  tentative — a  mere  introduction  to  the 
Science  of  Thought;  and  therefore  I  shall  at- 
tempt here  to  interpret  only  one  of  these  distinc- 
tions. But  it  is  the  most  conspicuous  and  vital 
one,  and  the  one  that  will  be  most  glibly  urged 
against  my  theory  of  judgment  and  reasoning. 
It  is  the  distinction  between  formal  or  immanent 
and  efficient  or  dynamic  causality. 


S26 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY 


In  the  Cartesian  philosophy,  especially  as  fin- 
ally developed  by  the  marvelous  Spinoza,  all  the 
emphasis  was  laid  upon  causality  as  immanent. 
The  type  of  the  causal  relations  was  the  relation 
between  a  substance  and  its  attributes,  qualities, 
etc  That  was  a  distinct  advance,  so  far  as  it 
negated  the  pre-scientific  Aristotlean  view  of 
qualities  as  themselves  occult  causes  stowed 
away  in  things. 

But  after  Newton's  great  discovery,  we  see  the 
emphasis  shifting  to  the  idea  of  causality  as  force. 
The  first  stir  of  the  transition  is  shown  in  Leib- 
niz^s  Monadology.   As  it  became  more  and  more 
evident  that  the  gist  of  science  was  insight  into 
the    motions    of    things    the    greater    the    stress 
upon  this  new  dynamic  view  of  causality.     The 
type  of  the  causal  relation  was  no  more  the  rela- 
tion of  substance  and  attribute  as  with  Spinoza, 
but  the  relation  of  force  to  motion— force  not 
immanent  or  fixed  in  things,  but  transitive    or 
rather  transilient,  leaping  from  object  to  object 
and  thus  producing  these  motions.     And  as  the 
older  view  of  causality  culminated  into  Spino- 
za's materialistic  pantheism,  so  the  newer  view 
culminated  in  the    ideal    or    what  would    more 
properly  be  called  the  abstract  pantheism  of  the 
Post-Kantian  philosophy. 

The  dispute  between  these  two  modes  of  con- 
ceiving has  done  much  towards  bringing  the 
question    of    causality    into    its    present    chaotic 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


327 


state.  Every  tyro  in  philosophy  knows  what  in- 
finite confusion  prevails.  There  are  no  definite 
and  fixed  distinctions  ;  all  is  fluid,  vague 
and  vacuous.  And  yet  from  our  pre'sent  point  of 
view  it  seems  easy  to  so  interpret  these  two  ap- 
parently conflicting  types  of  causality  as  to  give 
to  each  an  exactly  definite  value  and  at  the  same 
time  show  their  generic  unity. 

Here,  then,  on  the  one  side  we  have  a  relation 
of  dependence  between  qualities  and  things;  on 
the  other  side  a  relation  of  dependence  between 
motions  and  things.  The  average  professor  of 
philosophy  would  remonstrate,  off-hand,  against 
confounding  two  such  palpably  diverse  relations, 
the  one  merely  ''formal,"  the  other  ''efficient" 
and  "dynamic."  But  we  remind  him  of  the  Con- 
servation of  Energy — of  the  scienticfic  discovery 
that  all  qualities  are  ultimately  reducible  to  and 
identical  with  motions.  And  then  we  ask:  If 
attributes  and  motions  are  thus  identical,  how 
can  their  relations  to  things  be  so  essentially  dif- 
ferent? 

It  is  demonstrable  then  that  there  can  be  no 
eLential  difference  in  the  two  cases,  although 
apparently  so  diverse.  But  what,  then,  makes 
them  appear  so  diverse?  I  answer:  because 
we  are  regarding  the  same  relation  from  two  dif- 
ferent  points  of  view.  In  the  first  case— that  of 
substance  and  accident— we  are  regarding  the 
quality  mainly  as  dependent  upon  the  thing  from 


Ii' 


328       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

Avhich  it  has  been  abstracted,  although  perfectly 
aware  that  is  also  dependent  upon  other  things. 
In  the  second  case,  we  are  regarding  the  motion 
mainlv  as  dependent  upon  the  other  things,  al- 
though perfectly  aware  that  it  is  dependent  also 
upon  the  thing  it  is  abstracted  from. 

We  have  shown,  then,  both  that  the  relation  is 
identical  and  whv  it  seems  so  diverse.  The  proof 
may  be  made  clearer  hereafter.  But  just  as  it 
stands,  I  think  it  will  be  clear  and  conclusive 
enough,  except  to  those  with  whom  imagination 
is  so  strong  and  reason  so  weak  that  they  can 
think  of  force  only  as  some  sort  of  muscular  pull- 
ing cr  pushing. 

Reason    and    Cause.       Let    me    also    mention 
briefly  the  most  pregnant    of    all  such    distinc- 
tions,' that  between  cause  and  reason.    Nowhere 
have  I  been  able  to  find  a  clear-cut  and  valid  ac- 
count of  the  difference  between  these  most  sig- 
nificant terms;  on  the  contrary,  the  utmost  con- 
fusion  and   the  wildest   vagaries   seem   here  to 
prevail        For    example,  an    eminent    and    very 
thoughtful  representative  of  the  newest  monism 
•  defines  cause  as  meaning    merely    motion,  and 
reason  as  signifying  ^the  forces  of  nature,    such 
as  gravity,  elasticity,  etc.       The  upshot  of  tha 
would  seem  to  be  to  make  reasons  the  only  real 
causes  and  to  convert  causes  into  mere  effects, 
i.  r.,  motions.    Many  other  examples  of  equally 
beclouded  .views  might  be  given. 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


329 


But  one  main  design  of  this  treatise  is  to  draw 
a  precise  and  unimpeachable  distinction  be- 
tween cause  and  reason.  A  deep  and  exact  dif- 
ference, even  opposition,  between  them — undis- 
closed in  any  previous  system  of  speculation — 
will  be  demonstrated.  And  yet  even  here  a  uni- 
tary bond  will  be  found. 

The  Fundamental  Law  of  Knozvledge. 

That  law  is  simply  this:  Causes  can  be  known 
only  through  their  effects,  and  conversely,  ef- 
fects can  be  known  only  through  their  causes. 
In  other  words  we  know  the  objects  of  thought 
only  in  their  causal  relations  to  each  other. 
This  law  is  an  evident  corollary  from  our  funda- 
mental principle  that  all  thinking  is  a  relating  of 
cause  and  effect. 

Let  it  be  carefully  noted  at  the  outset  that  this 
law  prescribes  solely  the  method  and  not  the 
limits  of  knowledge.  Otherwise,  the  critic  may 
see  in  it  only  a  reduplicated  form  of  the  now 
prevailing  agnosticism:  thinking,  it  may  be 
urged,  is  thus  made  to  consist  in  the  combining 
of  two  unknown  quantities.  On  the  contrary, 
our  doctrine  clearly  understood  puts  an  impass- 
able barrier  before  the  advance  of  nescience. 
For,  it  shows  that  all  the  easy  inferences  now 
current  concerning  ''Relativity"  and  the  ''Un- 
knowable" are  based  upon  an  entire  misappre- 
hension of  what  knowledge  really  is.  Let  us 
consider  this. 


X 


330 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 


The   Fallacy  of  Resemblance.    Thinking,  as    I 
hope  to  show,  is  under  the  law  of  evolution;  it 
rises  from  the  simplest  causal  judgments,  little 
by  little,  by  processes  of  composition    and    de- 
composition, to  more  complex  and  comprehen- 
sive judgments.     But  error  also  is  under  the  law 
of  evolution ;  all  its  fallacies  are  but  more  or  less 
developed  forms  of  the  Fallacy  of  Resemblance. 
Furthermore,   the   average   intellect    naturally 
inclines  to  judgments   based    upon  mere  resem- 
blance rather  than  to  causal  ones.       For,  they 
are  easier  to  construct.     Man,  like  any  other  ani- 
mal, is  governed  largely  by  the  Law  of  Associa- 
tion—not, as    many   philosophers    imagine,  the 
association  of  thoughts  but  of  feelings.       Auto- 
matically, without  any  effort  on  our  part,  pres- 
ent sensations  or  feelings  cohere  with  images  of 
the  past  according  to  those    rules  of  similarity 
which  the  Association    philosophers    have  so  la- 
boriously   expounded.    This    process  of   linking 
like  to  like  goes  on  spontaneously;  and  thus  a 
life  of  sentiency  and  suggestion  is  formed  for  us 
which  does  not  differ  essentially  from  the  same 
life  in  horses  or  dogs.    Attempts  at  thinking  are 
so  suppressed  by  association  of  similarities  that 
our     judgments,    classifications    and    reasonings 
are  very    largely    founded    upon    mere    resem- 
blances.    The  first  and  often  the  last  interroga- 
tory   we    propound  concerning  any  object    is: 
What  does  it  look  like? 


THE  SCIENCE  OF  THOUGHT. 


331 


The  fallacy  of  all  such  judgments  based  solely 
upon  resemblance  is  evident.  They  have  in- 
herent in  themselves  their  own  contradiction. 
For  two  objects  are  never  so  much  alike  as  not 
to  be  unlike  in  some  respects.  So  that  we  can 
say:  "This  is  Hke  that,"  and:  "This  is  )iot  like 
that,"  with  equal  truthfulness. 

Judgment  and  reasoning  from  resemblance 
then,  show  themselves  upon  bare  inspection  as 
tending  to  fallacy.  And  yet  they  have  always 
formed  the  main  staple  of  metaphysicsal  dispu- 
tation. In  dealing  with  th'e  unseen,  elusive  phe- 
nomena of  thought  the  temptation  is  almost  ir- 
resistible to  picture  them,  to  clothe  them  in  the 
shape  and  semblance  of  things,  to  appeal  to  the 
imagination  and  misleading  analogies.  Hence 
the  midnight  that  has  enveloped  the  leading 
problems  of  the  mental  life.  Our  essay  will 
show  how  the  great  questions  of  Space,  Time. 
Perception,  Inductions,  Self-Consciousness,  and 
Causality  itself  have  been  converted  into  insolu- 
ble enigmas  by  this  pictorial  philosophy.  It  will 
show  also  that  the  only  w^ay  out  of  this  wilder- 
ness of  "Relativity''  and  "The  Unknowable"  is 
through  the  recognition  that  all  genuine  knowl- 
edge of  any  object  is  a  knowledge,  not  of  its  re- 
semblances, but  of  its  causal  relations. 


I 


1 


'Mi 


JUDGMENTS. 


333 


II. 


JUDGMENTS. 

To  Judge  is  to  Abstract.      Prior  to  judgments 
there  must  be  presentations  of  sense  common  to 
men    and    other   animals,   often    given    perhaps 
more  distinctly  and  exactly  to  the  mere  animal 
than  to  the  man.     But  the  presentation  is  only 
feeling,  not  thought.     It  is  possible,  even  com- 
mon for  us  to  gaze,  to  smell,  to  hear,  to  touch 
etc.,  and  for  the  appropriate  re-action  to  be  giv- 
en, to  these  stimuli,  without  any  act  of  thought 
whatsoever.     But  the    process    of    thinking  or 
judging  begins  only  with  a  conscious  act  of  an- 
alysis whereby  we  abstract  from  the  object  pre- 
sented, one  or  more  of  its  attributes.      No  mat- 
ter now  what  that  presented    object    may    be. 
Perchance  it  is  but  ":Maya,"  or  a  transcendental 
illusion;  that  question  does  not  concern  us  here. 
Nor  let  any  one  cavil  that  we  are  here  estab- 
lishing an  arbitrary  distinction  betweeen  feeling 
and  thought.    That  objection  comes  with  an  ill- 
grace  from  any  adherent  of  the  old  philosophies 
which  have  always  hopelessly  confounded  feel- 
ing and  thought,  without  a  serious  attempt  to 
make  any  more  than  a  purely  verbal  distinction 


between  them.  But  here  we  have  a  distinction 
perfectly  clear,  simple  and  precise.  Further- 
more, there  are  implicit  in  it  the  two  other  fun- 
damental differences  between  thought  and  feel- 
ing: First,  feeling  is  passive,  while  thought  is 
active.  The  sensation  of  the  color  or  the  odor 
of  an  object  is  presented  to  an  animal,  even  to  a 
caterpillar  perhaps  as  vividly  as  to  us  and  it  is 
instinctively  attracted  or  repelled  thereby.  But 
thought  is  essentially  active;  it  analyzes  the  ob- 
ject presented  into  two  factors  and  observes  the 
relations  between  them.  Secondly,  feeling  is 
stationary;  there  is  no  possibility  of  developing 
what  is  purely  passive  and  automatic.  But 
thought  is  progressive  ;  and  it  progresses  for  the 
very  reason  that  it  is  abstractive.  For,  as  I  hope 
to  show,  this  simple  act  of  abstraction  is  the  nu- 
cleus of  all  possible  forms  of  mental  develop- 
ment— the  tie  of  consanguinity,  so  to  speak,  con- 
necting the  first  perceptive  judgments  of  the 
child  with  the  most  profound  and  universal 
judgments  of  science.  Other  items  of  difference 
between  thought  and  feeling  might  be  men- 
tioned to  the  same  effect.  But  these  are  enough 
I  think,  to  show  that  we  have  here  a  clear-cut 
distinction  furnishing  a  solid  basis  for  a  true 
science  of  thought. 

Note  now  that  we  have  in  this  primitive  act  of 
abstraction  the  perfect  type  of  what  we  have  de- 
clared  at   the  outset   to   be    the    essence    of   all 


334       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF    HISTORY. 

thinking— to-wit,  the  establishment  of  causal  re- 
lations. For,  firstly,  that  which  is  abstracted  upon 
must  alwavs  remain  absolutely  dependent  upon 
the  object 'from  which  it  has    been    abstracted. 
So  patent  is  this  that  in  all  ages  logic  has  issued 
an  emphatic  warning  against  the  too  common 
error  of  disregarding  this  dependence;  of  con- 
ceiving the  abstracted  element  as  having  an  m- 
dependent,  substantial  existence  apart  from  the 
object  from  which  it  has  been  abstracted.      Sec- 
ondly, even  those  philosophers  who  seem  able 
to  tliink  onlv  in  figures  of  speech  and  are  there- 
fore most  strenuous  concerning  the  "ei^^ciency 
or  "dynamism"  of  true,  "ontological"  causahty 
must  'see  that  the  object  is  certainly  one  of  the 
causes  upon   which  its  attributes  or  properties 
depend.       If  not  let  them  read  again  what  was 
said  a  few  pages    back    concerning    immanent 
causality. 

Thirdly,  in  this  primary  act  of  abstraction  the 
demands'  of  our  Law  of  Knowledge  are  com- 
pletely fulfilled:  the  causes  cannot  be  known  or 
even  'thought  unrelated  to  its  effects  and  con- 
versely the  effect  apart  from  its  cause.       Mani- 
festly the  object  is  known  only  through  the  at- 
tributes abstracted  from  and  dependent  upon  it 
And  conversely  no  one  of  these  dependent  attri- 
butes can  be  known  or  thought  apart  from  the 
object;  to  try  to  think  it  thus  apart— as  inde- 
pendent and  isolated— is  confessedly  one  of  the 


JUDGMENTS. 


335 


most  childish  of  logical  errors.  Each  of  the  two 
factors,  the  object  or  that  which  is  abstracted,  is 
by  itself  but  a  semi-thought,  fragmentary,  sense- 
less. Only  when  they  are  causally  connected 
does  a  real  and  distinct  meaning  emerge. 

Note  now  that  the  old  philosophy  has  missed 
this  insight  through  its  passion  for  the  fallacy  of 
resemblance.  It  has  seen  the  abstracted,  the  at- 
tribute only  as  something  like  a  thing  "inher- 
ent" in  the  object,  sticking  in  it  apparently  like 
a  pin  in  a  pin-cushion.  From  that  theory  of  "in- 
herence" it  is  but  a  step  to  self-contradiction  and 
ultimate  skepticism.  But  from  all  this  we  are 
saved  by  simply  thinking  in  terms  of  cause  and 
effect. 

(2.)  To  Judge  is  to  Experiment.  Philosophy 
heretofore  has  taken  a  very  narrow  and  mislead- 
ing view  of  experimentation  as  a  rare  and  ex- 
tremely artificial  process,  for  the  most  part  car- 
ried on  only  in  the  laboratories  of  the  learned 
On  the  contrary  we  are  always  experimenting 
whenever  we  are  really  thinking.  For  this  work 
Nature  has  furnished  the  laboratory  in  our 
physical  organism.  She  has  provided  in  the  or- 
gans of  sense  a  wonderfully  delicate  and  com- 
plex apparatus  designed  to  present  before  us  a 
particular  phenomenon  isolated  from  modifying 
causes.  In  vision,  for  instance,  we  see  only  the 
object;  thus  one  cause  of  the  vision  is  presented 
before  us,  isolated  from  the  other  agencies  at 


''II 


336 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 


il 


w 

\ 


JUDGMENTS. 


337 


work,  the  aether  waves,  the  nerve  motions,  cere- 
bral changes,  etc.  If  all  these  were  perceived 
with  the  object,  infinite  confusion  would  result 
and  knowledge  be  rendered  impossible. 

Furthermore,  the  variety  of  the  organs  enable 
us  to  vary  the  experiment.  Through  the  sense 
of  touch,  for  instance,  we  can  experiment  to  see 
how  the  object  behaves  under  one  set  of  condi- 
tions; through  sight,  under  another  set  of  con- 
ditions; and  similarly  through  smell,  hearing 
etc.  Thus  through  a  continuous  process  of  ex- 
perimentation we  obtain  those  simple  percep- 
tive judgments  with  which  the  evolution  of 
.  thought  and  knowledge  begins. 

Note  further  that  the  results  thus  attained  are 
true  inductions.     For  instance,  an  object  is  pre- 
sented to  sight  and  a  particular  color  appears; 
the  object  is  removed,  the  color  vanishes.       Or 
the  object  is  touched  with  the  finger,  a  feeling  of 
resistance  is  felt;  the  object  is  touched  no  long- 
er, the    feeling    disappears.      In    both  cases  we 
have  used  the  '^:Method  of  Difference,"  which  is 
universally  regarded  as  the  gist  of  the  inductive 
process.     But  as  conmion  speech  has  confined 
the  term  induction  to  the  forming  of    universal 
propositions,   it   is   perhaps   better   to    speak    of 
these  primary  acts  of  abstraction  simply  as  ex- 
perimental. 

(3).     To  judge  is  to  afiirm  existence.       In  this 
I  agree  with    some    recent    logicians    who  lay 


much    stress    upon  the  "existential"    aspect    of 
judgments.     But  I  wholly  reject  their  interpre- 
tation and  proof  of  this  aspect.    Here  Mr.  Brad- 
ley's strange    juggling  with  such     uncouth  dis- 
tinctions   as    "Thisness"    and    "This,"  may    be 
passed  over  in   silence.     But   a  word  must  be 
said  concerning  a  more  seductive  theory  which 
regards  the  affirmation  of  existence  as  a  sort  of 
by-product  of  feeling — "the  reality-feeling,"  "the 
feeling  envelope  of  the  presentation,"  etc.     (i) 
That  is  not  merely  vague  and  inconclusive;  it  is 
a   sheer  plunge   into  the  pit   of  mysticism.     A. 
feeling,  so  far  from  proving  anything,  does  not 
even  assert  anything.       It  merely  feels  and  re- 
sponds automatically  to  the  stimulus.     A  "feel- 
ing envelope"  will  no  more  justify  our  belief  in 
reality  than  it  will  our  belief  in  the  equation  of 
the  cycloid.       To  overlook  this,  to  subvert  the 
distinction  between   feeling  and  thought,   is  to 
open  the  door  to  all  fanaticism  and  vagaries. 

There  is  a  safer  and  solider  ground  than  that 
for  our  belief  in  reality.  The  simplest,  most 
primary  judgment,  as  we  have  seen,  affirms  a 
causal  relation;  and  in  affirming  that  it  affirms 
existence.  For,  whatever  is  a  cause  developing 
an  effect,  must  exist  in  some  shape  or  other. 
The  nature  of  this  existence  is  of  course  a  mat- 
ter to  be  determined  hereafter. 


(J    Baldwin.    Fragments  of  Philosophy,  1902.    P.  240.  seq. 


1/7 


.38      THE  PHILOSaPHY   OF  HISTORY. 
Furthermore,  these  same  logicians  have  much 

^      T-    !lh  a  symbol  of  causal  connexion. 

copula  IS  simpU  a  sjmuui 

To  affirm  that  "This  is,  i.  e.,  exists,    is  then  to 

ate.      Has  not  the  difficulty  vanished  m  a  mo 
ment? 

Qualitative  Judgments. 
Hitherto  we  have    been    regarding    only  the 

«  tv,u  evclusive  reference  of  the 
But  we  soon  see  this  exciusiv 

The  subject  is  not  the  sole  cause,  but  a  cause. 

Qualitative  judgments  o-f  /^^",  ^^7;,^;,^ 
.Ui4.  to  this  advancing  know  e^ge  of  ^  ^cau._^ 
relation    connecting    the    preaicate 


JUDGMENTS. 


339 


causes,  besides  the  subject.  When  we  affirm, 
for  instance,  that  "this  is  red,"  we  do  not  think 
of  the  predicate  as  solely  an  effect  of  the  subject, 
but  as  something  adjectival,  added  to  and  quali- 
fying the  subject.  In  fine,  there  is  an  implicit 
reference  to  the  wider  field  of  causality.  This, 
I  think,  is  the  chief  peculiarity  in  judgments  of 
quality;  in  other  respects  they  have  the  same 
three-fold  character  as  the  perceptive  judgments 
already  described. 

Contrast  now  this  theory  of  judgment  with 
that  of  the  old  philosophies  which  have  never 
been  able  to  see  in  a  quality  anything  much  but 
its  resemblance  to  other  qualities  bearing  the 
same  name.  Firstly,  the  latter  theory  shows  it- 
self upon  its  very  face  to  be  vague  and  self-con- 
tradictory. Qualities  although  designated  by  a 
common  name  are  rarely  precisely  alike  in  dif- 
ferent things;  in  the  same  breath  we  may  say 
with  equal  truthfulness  that  they  are  alike  and 
they  are  }iot  alike.  Secondly,  no  relation  be- 
tween the  predicate  and  the  subject  is  exhibited 
except  the  absurd  and  impossible  one  of  ''inher- 
ence." Thirdly  and  most  important  of  all.  Ab- 
straction—the vital  breath  of  all  genuine  think- 
ing— loses  its  significance  and  is  even  put  under 
suspicion  as  a  breeder  of  vain  subtleties.  Hegel 
even  wished  to  create  a  New  Logic  wherein  **the 
barren  abstract''  should  be  replaced  by  ''the 
concrete,"  by  "the  organic"— in  fine,  by  a  meta- 
phor. 


340       THE    PHILOSOPHY    OF    HISTORY. 
Quantitative  Judgments. 

(i).     Quantitative  judgments  are  affirmations 
concerning    abstractions.     Therein    lies  their  es- 
sential difference  from  the  judgments  previously 
considered.      In  the  latter,  only  the  predicate  is 
an  abstraction  and    is  directly    referred    to  the 
subject  from  which  it  has  been  abstracted  and 
upon  which  it  depends.    In  the  qualitative  judg- 
ment, as  we  have  seen,  there  is  indeed  an  im- 
plicit reference  also  to  other  causes  besides  the 
subject  which  is  partially  disclosed  in  the  very 
form  of  this  predicate  as  an  adjective  and  not  a 
verb;  but  the  paramount  reference  is  to  the  sub- 
ject. '     But  in  the  quantitative  judgment  all  this 
is  changed.     Therein    we    reach  a  more  highly 
developed  form  of    the    judgm<ent  where    both 
subject  and  predicate  are  abstractions. 

It  is  true  that  this  abstract  character  of  the 
subject  is  not  made  very  conspicuous  in  familiar 
speech.     But  let  us  not  be  blinded  by  a  superfi- 
cial similarity  in  form  to  a  real  and  essential  dif- 
ference in  meaning;  that  is  to  be  victimized  by 
the  fallacy  of  resemblance.    When  we  say:  "This 
rod  is  five  feet  long,"  we  mean  that  the  length 
of  the  rod  equals  five  feet.     And  in  the  mote 
exact  language  of  science  judgments  of  quanti- 
ty invariably  assume  this  equational  form. 
'  But  in  thus  defining    judgments  of    quantity, 
have  I  not  overthrown  my  fundamental  princi- 
ple that  all  affirmation  is  essentially  an  affirming 


JUDGMENTS. 


341 


of  a  causal  relation?  By  no  means.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  way  has  been  prepared  for  exhibiting 
a  new  phase  in  that  evolution  of  thought  where- 
by we  continually  ascend  towards  a  wider  and 
at  the  same  tim^e  more  exact  view  of  causal  rela- 
tion.   Let  us  see. 

(2).  The  abstractions  which  form  the  subject 
and  predicate  of  a  quantitative  judgment  are  ab- 
stractions from  Space  and  Time.  And  here 
we  must  hold  in  abeyance  that  ancient  contro- 
versy over  the  ideality  of  space  and  time.  That 
will  be  considered  in  due  season.  It  is  enough 
here  to  show  that  the  two  terms  of  a  quantita- 
tive judgment  are  both  abstractions  from  space 
or  time,  no  matter  what  the  latter  may  finally 
prove  to  be. 

The  old  philosophy  has  not  clearly  seen  this, 
because  it  has  paid  little  attention  to  the  most 
fundamental  principle  of  all  science — the  com- 
plexity of  effects.  Take,  for  example,  the  dis- 
tance of  a  given  object.  That  distance  may  be- 
said,  in  one  sense,  to  be  abstracted  from  the  ob- 
ject; upon  that  it  is  dependent  at  least  for  its 
commensurability;  an  annihilated  object  would 
certainly  be  at  no  particular  distance  from  the 
observer.  But  the  distance  is  also  dependent — 
and  ultimately  so — upon  space;  from  that  it  was 
abstracted  and  without  that  it  could  not  exist. 
And  similarily  with  direction,  figure  and  other 
spatial  abstractions. 


■    1 


II 


342      THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 

Or  take  the  case  of  numerical  abstractions  or 
numbers      We  affirm,  for  instance,  that     there 
Te  seven  sheep  in  the  field."     Now  in  a  certam 
Tnse  Ihe  number  seven  has  been  abstractd  from 
he    htp;  for  we  have  gained  it  by  abstractmg 
from  e^cl    sheep  the  attribute    of    one-ness  or 
bdng  a  unit,  and  have    added    these  unUs  to- 
Zhl     But  in  a  far  deeper  and  ^lore  pregnant 
Sse    the  number  is  abstracted  from  and  de- 
"end'nt  upon  the  existence  of  time;  wUhout^ 
Lccessiv.  instants  the  -t-bermg  would  be  >m 
possible.     Countless  examples  m.ght  be  jven 
to  the  same  eflect.     In  all  cases  -'"^-"f  ^^j. 
stractions    are,  in    the  largest    sense    and    ult. 
mately,  abstracted  from  Time;  and  spat.al  ab- 
Stractions  from  Space. 

(3).    This  insight  explains  the  well-kno^^•n  fact 
that  the  goal  of  science  is   H.  transfonmmnof 
qualitative     into     quantitative     H^^"'^-  .  J^^^ 
qualities  are    abstracted    entirely    from    thmgs 
and  therefore  thev    partake,  to  some    extent  at 
Last    of   that  infinite    variability  which  attaches 
to  things.     There  is  no  quality  which  does  not 
hold  wfthin  itself  some  shade  of  difference  from 
a    fmilar  quality  in  another  thing.    But  quarj. 
tative  abstractions,  as  we  have  seen,  are  ultt 
mately  abstracted  from  space  or  time,  both  of 
which  have  absolute  uniformity,  "-hangeable- 
ness  and  continuity.     And  because    quantitative 
affirmations  partake   of  this  invariableness  and 


JUDGMENTS. 


343 


exactitude,  it  becomes  possible  for  science  to 
attain  through  them  to  universal  judgments 
which  are  mathematically  demonstrable. 

Take  notice  likewise  of  the  concomitant  truth 
which  has  also  just  been  shown.  These  quanti- 
tative abstractions  are,  in  a  secondary  sense,  ab- 
stracted from  and  dependent  upon  concrete  ob- 
jects. By  remembering  this  science  has  been 
kept  from  losing  itself  in  the  wilderness  of  mere- 
ly abstract  speculation.  It  has  always  insisted 
upon  verifying  its  splendid  abstractions  by 
showing  their  exact  correspondence  with  the 
actual  state  of  things  in  the  world  of  sense. 
Thus  our  theory  of  quantity  seems  already  to 
foreshadow  and  to  explain  that  double  crown  of 
science — its  two-fold  capacity  for  inconceivably 
abstract  speculation  and  for  strictly  verifying  its 
conclusions. 

It  may  not  be  amiss  to  add  that  our  theory  of 
quantity  is  fortunate  in  being  apparently  with- 
out a  rival.  The  older  logicians  seem  to  have 
early  given  up  the  attempt  to  propound  such  a 
theory  as  hopeless;  and  Hegel  finds  it  easy 
enough  to  show  in  his  Logic  that  tbeir  defini- 
tions of  quantity  were  but  the  baldest  tautolo- 
gies. True,  Hegel  has  propounded  a  theory  of 
his  own  in  which  he  describes  quantity  as  an 
early  and  crude  phase  of  "self-negating  negativ- 
ity." But  that  fails  to  comply  with  a  very  mod- 
est demand  which  we  have  the  right  to  make 


/ 

i 


-.344       THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 

of  every  theory :  if  it  does  not  make  clear  what 
was  dark,  at  least  it  ought  not  to  darken  what 
was  clear. 

Universal  Judgments, 
As  yet  we  have  treated  only  of  particular 
judgments,  but  we  come  now  to  a  still  more  dif- 
ficult problem.  How  shall  we  explain  and  guar- 
antee the  validity  of  those  universal  judgments 
which  form  the  substance  of  science,  and  yet 
seem  to  lie  beyond  the  bounds  of  all  possible  ex- 
perience? That  problem,  despite  many  earnest 
endeavors,  has  never  been  satisfactorily  solved. 
It  is  the  great  scandal  of  modern  logic  that 
while  every  one  is  talking  about  the  scientific 
method,  no  one  seems  able  to  give  a  precise 
answer  to  the  question:  What  is  the  scientific 
method? 

To  prove  this  and  at  the  same  time  to  eluci- 
date my  own  theory,  let  us  consider  the  now 
most  generally  accepted  exposition  of  the  induc- 
tive process.  It  is  Mill's  theory  of  the  Five 
Methods.  Upon  its  very  face  this  multipHcity 
of  methods  suggests  a  suspicion  of  empirical 
and  unscientific  explanation.  But  letting  that 
go,  let  us  examine  the  first  two  of  these  meth- 
ods, they  being  confessedly  the  fundamental 
ones. 

The  Method  of  Agreement.       This  is  but  the 
Tulgar     method    per     enumerationem     simplieem 


JUDGMENTS. 


345 


with  a  very  important  proviso  annexed.  The 
proviso  is  that  the  enumerated  instances  should 
"have  only  one  circumstance  in  common,"  But 
that  stultifies  the  whole  exposition;  for,  it  is 
manifestly  impossible  when  we  observe  many  in- 
stances of  an  effect  or  rather  of  similar  effects, 
to  know  that  their  antecedents  agree  in  only  one 
particular.  Mill's  restriction  upon  the  vulgar 
method,  guards  against  its  abuses  by  making 
the  method  impossible. 

Does  some  one  urge  that  only  material  cir- 
cumstances ought  to  be  considered,  those  hav- 
ing some  appreciably  adequate  power  to  pro- 
duce the  effect?  But  that  would  over-turn  the 
entire  method,  and  substitute  for  it  something 
quite  different  and  even  contrary.  The  inquiry 
would  hinge,  not  upon  the  number  of  instances, 
but  upon  the  adequacy  of  the  cause  to  produce 
the  effect. 

Note,  however,  that  our  quarrel  is  not  with' 
the  method  of  agreement  in  itself.  Used  wisely, 
under  the  qualification  just  given,  it  leads  in 
many  cases  to  a  sufficient  degree  of  certainty. 
Our  only  objection  is  to  the  attempt  to  convert 
it — by  foisting  upon  it  an  impossible  condition 
— into  one  of  the  methods  of  scientific  induc- 
tion, which  it  is  not. 

Th^:  Method  of  Diiference.  Here  we  find 
the  same  impossible  condition  annexed  as  in  the 
previous  canon:  there  must  be  a  "circumstance 


I 


li  '■ 


346 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 


in  which  alone  the  two    instances   differ."       Let 
us  consider  the  only  example  given  by  Mill  in 
his  exposition  of    the    method:       A    man    shot 
through  the  heart,  dies  instantly.     Undoubtedly 
there  is  in  this  proof  enough  that  in  this  partic- 
ular case  the  death  was    caused  by  the  wound. 
But  what  warrants  us,  in  converting  that  partic- 
ular judgment  into  a   universal   one?    What  en- 
ables us  to  infer  that  death  is  the  invariable  con- 
sequent of  gun-shot  wounds  in  the  heart?     Be- 
cause, Mill  asserts,  all  other  circumstances  were 
the  same  except  the  wound;  "the  man  was  m  the 
fullness  of  life  immediately  before."     But  that 
we  can  never  know  except  as  more  or  less  prob- 
able.    Men  apparently  in  the  fullness  of  life,  of- 
ten drop  dead    without  any    perceptible   cause. 
Even  then  in  this  extreme  case,  we  must  search 
for  some  other  warrant  for  a  universal  judgment 
than  that  afforded  by  Mill's  method. 
•       The  true  warrant  evidently  is  in  our  previous 
knowledge  that  such  a  wound  is  adequate  in  all 
cases  to  produce  death.    The  injury  inflicted  up- 
on the  most  delicate    part    of    the    frail    boddy 
mechanism  is  so  great  that  nothing  could  coun- 
teract the  result.    But  if  the  wound  had  been  on 
the  finger,  would  we   have    framed    a   universal 
judgment  therefrom?    Would  we  not   have   said 
rather  that    death    had    been    caused  by  fright^ 
heart-failure   or  some    other    unknown    cause? 
And  so  in  all  cases,  I  think,  the    real    warrant 


JUDGMENTS. 


347 


for  the  induction  is  in  a  previous  knowledge  for 
which  Mill's  canon  makes  no  provision. 

We  dismiss  then  these  famous  Methods  as 
merely  annexing  an  impossible  condition  to  the 
old  empirical  methods.  And  so  we  still  have  be- 
fore us  the  problem  of  determining  the  essential 
distinction  between  scientific  and  merely  empir- 
ical induction. 

In  the  Philosophy  of  History  the  secret  of  the 
scientific  method  was  stated  as  being  a  process 
of  abstracting  and  accounting  for  the  modifying 
causes.  Some  fifty  or  sixty  pages  were  devoted 
to  setting  forth  the  historical  evidence  that  all 
the  physical  sciences  have  had  their  origin  in  a 
developing  comprehension  of  the  complexity  of 
effects — in  a  continuous  discovery  of  modifying 
causes  before  unknown  or  disregarded.  But  we 
have  now  reached  a  point  of  view  where  it  is  pos- 
sible to  go  still  deeper  and  make  an  important 
addition  to  that  statement.  We  can  show  pre- 
cisely what  it  is  that  makes  possible  this  scientific 
analysis  of  the  complexity  of  effects.  This  in- 
most secret  of  the  inductive  method  is  its  quanti- 
tative conception  of  force. 

The  Conception  of  Force.  The  term  force,  as 
commonly  understood,  is  as  vague  as  it  is  famil- 
iar. It  is  used  as  a  loose  synonym  for  power, 
efficiency  or  causality  of  any  kind.  But  since 
the  discovery  of  the  first  two  laws  of  motion,  a 
new  scientific  conception  of  force  has  gradually 


1 


I- 

!  ' 


It 


34S 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 


developed  which  is  as  definite  and  exact  as  any 
other    mathematical    term.     These    discoveries 
made  it  possible  to  establish  units  of  motion  in- 
variable in  velocity  and  direction,  and  to  analyzo 
all  actual  motions,    inconceivably    complex  and 
changeful  as  they  are,  into  mathematical  sums  of 
such  units,  and  the  unit  of  force  thus  became 
whatsoever  cause  was  adequate  to  the  production 
of  such  a  unit  of  motion.    Thus  the  quantitative 
conception  of  force  arose— a  symbol  for  caus- 
ality conceived  as  absolutely  invariable  and  ana- 
lysable  into  a  sum  of  exactly  equivalent  units. 
'  Note,  now,  first,  that    only    through    such  a 
quantitative  conception  does  the  analysis  of  Na- 
ture's complex   and    ever    changing  effects    be- 
come   possible.     The    simplest    calculations    in 
arithmetic  would  be  impossible,  if  the  units  used 
were  variable.     How  much  more  impossible  un- 
der the  same  supposition  would  the  Infinitesimal 
Calculus  become  by  which  the  astronomer  anal- 
yzes the  earth^s  motions,  calculates  the    several 
'influences  of  all  the  perceptible  causes  and  sums 
them  all  up  in  a  result  minutely  accordant  with 

observation ! 

Secondly,  this  conception  of  force  makes  it 
possible  to  demonstrate  the  uniformity  of  causa- 
tion. To  see  this  it  is  only  necessary  to  rightly 
distinguish  between  effect  and  cause.  The  ob- 
served effects  are  infinitely  changeful;  but  in  all 
these  changes  each  still  remains  the  product  of 


JUDGMENTS. 


349 


some  definite  sum  of  unvarying,  equivalent  units 
of  force. 

The  Law  of  Physical  Causation.  See  now  how 
fully  our  fundamental  Law  of  Knowledge  is  here 
vindicated.  First,  the  cause  is  known  only 
through  its  effects.  Consider  that  widest  of  all 
scientific  inductions — the  doctrine  of  the  conser- 
vation of  energy.  But  what  is  energy  more  than 
an  abstract  expression  for  causality  conceived  as 
acting  with  absolute  invariability  or  mathemati- 
cal uniformity?  Beyond  that  there  is  no  knowl- 
edge of  energy  except  through  its  results,  to-wit, 
the  motions  it  produces.  True,  many  physicists 
like  to  think  of  energy  or  forces  as  immanent  in 
things;  nor  is  there  any  objection  to  that  consid- 
ered as  a  mere  mode  of  conceiving — an  expedi- 
ent for  calculating  directions,  etc.,  and  an  aid  to 
the  imagination.  But  there  the  true  scientific 
spirit  stops.  To  insist  that  we  have  any  real 
knowledge  of  forces  as  little  entities  hidden  in 
things  and  passing  out  of  them — that  is  to  be 
victimized  by  the  fallacy  of  resemblance. 

Secondly  the  effects  are  known  only  through 
their  causes.  The  simplest  motion  conceivable 
is  still  a  complex  effect,  dependent  upon  a  mov- 
ing thing,  force,  time  and  space;  and  how  can 
we  know  or  even  think  of  it  independently  of 
these,  its  causal  factors?  Or  take  some  more 
complicated  case,  the  infinitesimal  variations  of 
acclerating  motion,  for  instance;  these  defv  even 


350 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 


JUDGMENTS. 


351 


imagination ;  the  fact  of  their  existence  even  was 
first  discovered  only  by  abstract  reasoning  from 
the  thought  of  continuous  forces.  Or  take  the 
still  more  wonderful  changes  of  motion  into 
heat,  color,  etc.  To  humor  the  imagination  we 
speak  of  these  as  transformations;  and  yet  it  is 
more  than  inconceivable,  it  is  self-contradictory, 
to  speak  of  the  formless  as  changing  its  form. 
We  know  only  that  these  abstractions  are  in 
certain  definite  causal  relations  with  motions. 
So  alwavs  and  everywhere,  the  only  knowledge 
of  motion  is  a  knowledge  of  that  upon  which 
motion  depends. 

Deduction.      Little  need  be  added  here  to  what 
was  said  in  the  main  treatise.    The  function  of 
the  syllogism  is  simply  to  unite  and  apply  to  par- 
ticular cases  the  truths    obtained  by  induction. 
Its    art    consists    in    remembering    and    using 
knowledge  already  gained,  and  its  rigidly  me- 
chanical operations    are    very  much  like  those 
whereby  in  animal  sentiency  a  present  sensation 
is  fused  with  past  images.    In  fine,  the  exagger- 
ated importance  generally  attached  to  the  syllo- 
gism  is  a  striking  proof  of  how  entirely   our 
modern  philosophy  has  been  but  a  revamping  of 
the  pre-scientific  philosophy  of  Greece. 

Note,  however,  that  all  long  chains  of  reason- 
ing naturally  assume  the  syllogistic  form;  for, 
the  syllogism  is  the  instrum-ent  for  combining 
and  applying  inferences.     The    inferences    thus 


united,  however,  are  essentially  inductive.  In 
geometry,  for  instance,  the  main  thing  is  to  see 
at  each  minute  step  of  th^  reasoning  that  what  is 
true  in  the  particular  case  presented  in  the  dia- 
gram, is  universally  true;  and  that  is  induction. 


SPACE. 


353 


III. 

SPACE. 

Confessedly,  one  of  the  most  perplexing  of  all 
philosophic  problems  is  that  of  space.  To  this 
problem  I  wish  now  to  apply  my  fundamental 
law  of  thought,  that  all  thinking  is  a  relating  of 
cause  and  effect,  and  that  neither  of  these  can  be 
known  except  in  relation  with  the  other.  On 
the  one  side  we  have  some  apprehension  of  in- 
finite space;  on  the  other,  of  the  spatial  proper- 
ties of  things,  sucll  as  forms,  distances,  direc- 
tions, etc.  My  thesis  is  that  these  two  factors, 
space  and  the  spatial  attributes  of  things  are  re- 
laated  to  each  other  as  causae  and  effect.  Space 
by  itself  is  but  a  vague,  elusive  semi-thought 
which  can  be  truly  known  or  even  thought  of 
only  through  reference  to  the  spatial  attributes. 
And  conversely,  the  attributes  can  be  known  or 
even  thought  only  by  relating  them  to  that  infin- 
ite space  upon  which  they  depend.  And,  I  fur- 
ther hope  to  show  that  the  obscurities  and  para- 
doxes enveloping  the  spatial  problem  have  come 
from  ignoring  this  fundamental  law  of  thought. 


Tlie  Kantian  Theory  of  Space.  Let  us  consider 
first  the  arguments  by  which  this  famous  theory 
IS  supported  by  its  author. 

(i).  Space,  Kant  first  maintains  is  not  derived 
by  abstraction  from  particular  external  experi- 
ences; on  the  contrary  the  perception  of  objects 
presupposes  the  idea  of  space  '*as  an  intuition 
a  priori,  before  all  experience."  The  argument 
here  is  based  upon  a  narrow  and  erroneous  view 
of  abstraction.  We  have  now  discovered  and 
proved  that  in  every  abstracting  act,  the  attri- 
bute abstracted  is  shown  as  dependent  not  only 
upon  the  thing  or  substance,  but  also  upon  other 
causes.  In  the  case  of  spatial  attributes  this 
secondary  ground  of  dependence  is  space.  But 
how,  it  may  be  asked,  do  we  get  the  idea  of 
space?  I  answer  that  we  do  not  get  it  apart  as  a 
distinct,  isolated  idea,  any  more  than  we  get  the 
isolated  idea  of  the  object  or  of  the  attribute. 
Taken  thus  apart  each  is  but  the  fragmentary 
suggestion  of  an  idea.  What  is  a  thing  without 
a  form?  Or  a  form  without  a  thing?  Or  space 
without  spatial  properties?  But  each  becomes 
intelligible-  when  united  with  the  other  in  causal 

relation. 

Without  this  insight,  Kant  finds  it  impossible 
to  conceive  of  space  except  as  a  wholly  magical 
creation  of  the  perceiving  intelleqt. 

(2).  Kant's  second  argument  is  that  the  no- 
tion of  space  is  a  necessary  a  priori  idea,  a  pre- 


'/< 


m 


I) 


ti! 


:354       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

condition  of  the  possibility  of  all  phenomena. 
As  others  have  noted,  this  is  nothing  mre  than 
a  new  assertin  of  the  thesis  which  the  Critique 
purports  to  prove.  But  it  gives  me  the  opportu- 
nity for  showing  the  exact  point  of  failure  in  the 
Kantian  solution  of  the  problem — not  only  of 
space  but  of  all  thought. 

That  point  of  failure  is  that  Kant  made 
knowledge  to  begin  with  a  blind,  unconscious 
act.  His  necessary  a  priori  ideas  are  mere  as- 
sumptions necessitated  by  *'our  mental  make- 
irp" — compulsory,  irresistible  beliefs — aflFirma- 
tions  which  the  mind  is  somehow  mysteriously 
compelled  to  make  without  knowing  any  more 
why  it  makes  them  than  a  stone  knows  why  it 
falls.  And  knowledge  thus  starting  as  a  blind, 
mechanically  determined  activity,  never  after- 
ward gains  any  other  character.  In  the  end,  it 
confesses  itself  not  to  be  genuine  knowledge, 
but  nescience,  mere  "phenomenality."  We  read 
again  and  again  that  Kant  showed  how  knowl- 
edge was  possible;  he  showed  rather  how 
knowledge  was  impossible. 

And  vet  Kant  was  verv  near  the  solution  of 
the  great  problem.  In  reducing  to  a  system  the 
mongrel  crowd  of  innate  id-eas,  necessary  truths, 
intuitions,  etc.,  imagined  by  dermatic  idealism, 
and  in  genetically  tracing  them  back  to  some 
primary  connection  with  the  ideas  of  space  and 
.time,  he  was  presenting  the  problem  in  so  mas- 


SPACE. 


355 


terly  a  shape  as  to  make  its  solution  seem  not 
very  far  away.  And  it  was,  I  think,  this  sense 
of  a  great  problem  almost  solved,  this  expectancy 
of  a  light  about  to  break  forth,  which  gave  to 
the  Critique  such  a  wonderfully  fascinating  pow- 
er over  human  thought.  Everybody,  at  least  in 
German V,  thought  himself  competent  to  com- 
plete the  master's  work.  But  his  ''successors" 
failed— almost  comically.  And  they  failed,  I 
think,  because  they  did  not  have  that  full,  deaf 
view  of  the  significance    of   the    problem  which 

Kant  had. 

For  the  present  I  content  myself  with  statmg 
anew  this  problem.  It  is  to  discover  some  other 
origin  and  basis  of  knowledge  than  mere  as- 
sumptions which  all  men,  blindly,  without  knowl- 
ing  why,  are  compelled  to  believe  just  as  all 
stones  are  compelled  to  fall.  But  the  Kantian 
philosophy  merely  gives  us  a  reason  for  not  be- 
lieving what— as  it  asserts  in  the  same  breath— 
we  are  blindly  compelled  to  believe. 

(3).  The  third  argument  rests  upon  the 
supposition  that  space  is  a  whole  divisible  into 
manv  parts.  But  upon  this  argument  we  shall 
not  dwell,  because  we  are  to  consider  it  later  in 
its  more  modern  form  as  the  theory  of  space 
conceived  as  a  sum  of  relations.  Suffice  it  now 
that  the  great  German  here  falls  a  victim  to  the 
fallacy  of  resemblance.  He  can  conceive  of 
space  only    under    ijie   similitude  of   a  divisible 


Ill 


356       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

thing.  But  the  very  essence  of  space  is  to  be  in- 
divisible, inseparable.  Parts  of  space  are  pure  fig- 
ures of  speech;  and  the  only  rational  way  in 
which  we  can  think  of  any  spatial  property  of 
things  is  simply  as  dependent  upon  space. 

(4).  Again  space  is  infinite.  But  to  know  it 
as  thus  actually  existent,  one  would  have  to 
count  up,  in  Kant's  opinion,  the  infinite  number 
of  its  parts.  But  that  would  be  plainly  impossi 
ble  in  an  ordinary  life-time ;  therefore  our  knowl- 
edge of  infinite  space  must  be  derived  from  some 
a  priori,  congenital  "form  of  our  sensibility." 

But  there  would  be  no  need  of  so  much  count- 
ing in  order  to  discover  that  space  is  infinite,  if 
one  would  discard  the  fallacy  of  resemblance 
and  think  only  in  terms  of  cause  and  effect. 
Then  he  would  see  instantly  that  all  limitation 
of  the  extended  depends  upon  and  is  made  pos- 
sible only  by  space.  Whatsoever  is  thus  limited, 
must  have  space  beyond  it.  Therefore,  if  space 
is  limited  or  finite  it  must  have  space  beyond  it ; 
which  is  a  contradiction  in  terpis. 

(5).  The  Possibility  of  Mathematics.  The  four 
arguments  just  given  form  the  corner-stone  of 
Kant's  system;  and  yet  he  has  presented  them 
almost  as  cursorily  as  I  have.  But  there  is  an- 
other argument  upon  which  his  heart  was  plainly 
set;  especially  in  the  Prolegomena  he  expa- 
tiates upon  it  at  great  length  and  lovingly.  The 
argument  is  that  only  upon  his  hypothesis  can 


SPACE. 


357 


philosophic  certainty  be  assured  to  mathematics. 
And  if  there  is  no  other  way,  it  would  perhaps 
be  well  to  give  up  the  spatial  world  as  a  tran- 
cendental  illusion  in  order  to  save  mathematics 
and  a  part  of  morals. 

But  there  is  another  way.  It  consists  in  re- 
signing all  hope  of  reaching  real  knowledge  ex- 
cept by  thinking  in  terms  of  cause  and  effect. 
Confining  ourselves  to  the  question  of  space,  let 
us  remember  that  the  geometer  demands  only  to 
be  assured  of  the  exact  uniformity  or  unchange- 
ableness  of  space.  What  is  geometrically  proved 
true  here  must  be  true — not,  as  Mill  thinks,  in  a 
"a  reasonable  degree  of  adjacent  cases" — but 
true  everywhere  even  to  infinitude.  Nowhere 
must  there  be  the  most  infinitesimal  lapse  in  the 
immovability  of  space. 

How,  then,  is  this  assurance  of  spatial  con- 
tinuity gained?  I  answer  that  it  is  implicit  in 
all  perceptions  of  moving  things.  Motion  is  a 
complex  effect,  dependent  upon  and  inseparable 
from  some  moving  thing,  but  also  dependent 
upon  the  absolute  fixedness  of  points  in  space. 
If  there  were  no  such  unalterableness  of  the  spa- 
tial points,  motion  would  lack  all  determination 
of  direction  or  velocity  and  therefore  could  nev- 
er be  known. 

The  fact  just  stated  may  be  illustrated  by  means 
of  a  queer  conclusion  reached  by  Mr.  Spencer, 
the  great  nineteenth  century  phophet  of  'The 


358       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

Unknowable."  He  instances  at  great  length  the 
case  of  a  man  walking  on  a  ship  which  is  sailing 
in  the  opposite  direction  upon  a  sea  which  as 
part  of  the  earth  is  being  carried  in  still  another 
direction,  with  several  other  complications.  And 
he  concludes  therefrom  that  **our  ideas  of  mo- 
tion are  illusive:"  that  even  motion  is  unknow- 
able. One  might  as  well  affirm  that  algebra  was 
an  unknowable,  self-contradictory  science  be- 
cause it  insisted  upon  adding  together  plus  and 
minus  quantities.  For  the  case  given  is  merely 
that  of  a  sum  of  motions  which  partially  cancel 
each  other.  And  the  ultimate  motion  obtained 
by  adding  these  plus  and  minus  quantities  would 
plainly  be  altogether  unknowable  and  also  im- 
possible, if  there  were  no  fixed  points  in 
space,    (i)  J 

There  is  then  no  need  of  affirming  the  subjec- 
tivitv  of  space  in  order  to  make  mathematics 
possible.  Thus  the  only  argument  upon  which 
Kant  seems  really  to  have  relied  is  obliterated. 

It  may  likewise  be  added  that  there  is  no  need 
of  any  other  a  priori  machinery  of  innate  ideas 
or  intuitions  to  assure  us  that  continuous,  im- 
movable space  exists.  That  assurance  is  given 
by  the  logical  process  of  abstraction— that  es- 
sence of  all  reasoning— which  proves  to  us  that 


SPACE. 


351». 


(1)    Spencer.    First  Pi^nciples. 


every  perceptible  motion  is  an  abstract  from  and 
dependent  upon  space. 

There  is,  then,  no  good  reason  for  accepting 
the  Kantian  supposition.  But,  it  may  still  be 
urged,  is  there  not  at  least  a  bare  possibility  of 
its  being  true?  If  not  probable,  is  it  not  at  least 
possible  that  space  is  but  a  product  of  our  sub- 
jectivity? I  answer:  No!  But  the  full  demon- 
stration thereof  must  be  reserved  to  the  next  sec- 
tion, where  we  treat  of  perception.  For  the 
present  let  the  following  suffice. 

Kant  undeniably  made  a  great  advance  upon 
the  skepticism  of  Hume,  when  he  showed  that 
all  the  objects  of  thought  or  the  understanding — 
Space,  Time,  the  World,  Substance,  Cause,  etc., 
— were  so  closely  interrelated  that  to  deny  one 
was  to  deny  all.  But  he  did  not  take  the  final 
step.  He  did  not  see  that  thought  itself  was  so 
peculiarly  interrelated  with  the  objects  of  thought 
that  to  cancel  them  was  to  render  all  thinking 
impossible.  This  insight  would  have  saved  him 
from  that  pit  of  "subjectivity"  from  which  he 
was  always  evidently  striving  to  escape,  but  in 
vain. 

The  Argument  from  Interaction..  But  in  addi- 
tion to  these  Kantian  arguments  there  are  two 
others  of  a  more  showy,  superficial  kind,  and 
therefore  more  current  in  recent  philosophy. 
Both  of  them,  as  I  hope  to  show,  are  products 


L*ll'il 


360       THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

of  the  fallacy  of  resemblance — that  deep-rooted 
tendency  of  the  human  animal  to  think  only  in 
figures  of  speech.  One  of  these  arguments 
springs  from  the  attempt  to  picture  space  in  the 
likeness  of  things  considered  as  interacting;  the 
other,  in  the  likeness  of  a  thing  as  made  up  of  a 
whole  and  its  parts.  Let  us  first  examine  the 
argument  from  interaction. 

Let  me  present  this  argument  in  the  words  of 
an  American  idealist  noted  for  keenness  and 
vigor  of  thought:  ''Unless  we  endow  space  with 
activity  and  regard  it  as  a  peculiar  something  in 
interaction  with  other  things  the  affirmation  of 
its  existence  becomes  absurd;  and  its  existence 
would  in  no  way  be  distinguishable  from  its 
non-existence."  (i). 

Such  is  the  argument  from  interaction.  How 
childish  it  seems!  For,  first,  what  is  interaction 
but  the  production  of  motion..  But  motion  has 
no  meaning  except  as  change  of  position  in 
space.  And  so  the  argument  reduces  itself  to 
this:  Space  does  not  exist  because  it  does  not 
change  position  in  space. 

Secondly.  We  are  told  that  because  space 
does  not  interact,  its  existence  would  be  indis- 
tinguishable from  its  non-existence ;  space  there- 
fore is  merely  phenomenal.  But  in  another  place, 
the  author  argues  that  things  likewise  cannot  in- 


SPACE. 


961 


(1)     Bowne.    Metaphysia   129. 


teract,  and  therefore  they  are  merely  phenom- 
enal. This  is  the  chief  weapon  of  "critical"  ideal- 
ism— a  preposterous  hatchet  with  which  it  splits 
sensible  reality  into  impossible  parts  and  then 
easily  shows  that  each  of  the  dissevered  parts  is 
a  ghostly  illusion.  It  is  of  course  impossible  that 
either  space  or  spatial  properties  or  things 
should  be  perceptible  apart  from  each  other. 

Thirdly.  This  argument  from  interaction 
shows  upon  its  very  face  its  descent  from  the  fal- 
lacy of  resemblance.  Space  in  order  to  exist 
must  be  like  things,  must  move  and  be  moved; 
and  because  it  is  not  thus  like  things,  it  does  not 
exist.     Such  is  the  pictorial  philosophy. 

Space  as  a  Sum  of  Relations.  This  argument 
has  the  same  origin  as  the  one  just  considered 
concerning  interaction.  Space  is  pictorially  rep- 
resented as  an  infinite  thing  divisible  into  an  in- 
finite number  of  parts.  And  as  innumerable  ab- 
surdities must  inevitably  result  from  such  a  fan- 
cy as  that,  space  is  once  more  dismissed  as  mere- 
ly subjective,  existing  only  "in  and  for  the 
mind."  Even  the  cool-headed  Kant  was  led 
astray  at  this  point  and  painfully  pointed  out 
that  it  would  take  too  much  time  to  count,  all 
this  infinite  number  of  parts  and  that  therefore 
space  must  be  an  a  priori  form  of  intuition. 

The  persistent  error  in  all  such  argumenta- 
tions is  the  false  assumption  of  the  divisibility  of 


362       THE    PHILOSOiPHY    OF   HISTORY. 

space.  Space  may  be  mentally  analyzed,  but  it 
cannot  be  actually  divided.  Every  one  will  see 
the  moment  he  begins  to  reflect  that  the  very  es- 
sence of  space  is  its  absolute  continuity.  Bisect 
it  and  there  is  still  space  between  the  parts.  In 
fact  the  very  idea  of  division  or  separation  in- 
volves that  of  space  between  the  parts  separated; 
for,  if  there  were  no  space  between,  there  would 
be  no  separation.  Space  may  be  analyzed;  we 
can  measure  it  by  means  of  things  used  as  units 
of  measurement;  we  may  imagine  the  space 
within  a  room  as  separated  from  that  outside. 
But  in  all  these  operations  space  is  mentally  an- 
alyzed, not  actually  divided. 

But  that,  it  will  be  urged,  is  but  a  trivial  dis- 
tinction, a  mere  truism.  And  so  it  would  be  in 
the  light  of  the  old  philosophy,  which  sees  in 
mental  analysis  nothing  more  than  a  mental  as 
distinguished  from  a  physical  operation.  But 
we  have  now  passed  far  beyond  that  naive  view. 
We  have  gained  a  new  insight  into  the  deep 
meaning  and  universal  scope  of  abstraction. 
We  see  that  abstraction  does  not  consist  mere- 
ly in  mentally  dividing  or  separating  the  attri- 
bute from  its  object  but  that  it  instantaneously 
puts  them  together  again — unites  them  in  causal 
relation  to  each  other.  In  Hue,  to  abstract  is  to  re- 
late. 

To  merely  divide  mentally  leaves  the  divided 
halves  as  urrelated  as  the  halves  of  a  split  log 


SPACE. 


363 


are  physically.  And  to  that  process  the  old  phi- 
losohpy  has  practically  confined  itself,  in  its  view 
of  abstraction.  Let  us  apply  this  insight  to  the 
chief  idealistic  arguments  concerning  space  re- 
lations. 

(i).  Spatial  relations,  it  is  said,  have  no  inde- 
pendent existence  of  their  own;  therefore,  they 
must  exist  only  in  and  for  thought,  and  so  like- 
wise must  space,  which  is  but  their  sum. 

Non-scqiiitur.  The  premise  is  undeniable:  the 
spatial  form,  for  instance,  which  we  abstract 
from  any  given  thing  has  no  independent  exist- 
ence. The  form  without  the  thing  is  indeed 
nothintg.  But  likew^ise  the  thing  without  a  form 
is  nothing.  Abstraction,  however,  does  not  con- 
sist in  splitting  a  thing  asunder  into  two  noth- 
ings. It  is  an  analysis  of  the  thinig  into  two  fac- 
tors conjoined  with  an  instantaneous  synthesis 
of  these  two  as  cause  and  effect.  The  abstract 
and  the  object  abstracted  from  still  exist  indis- 
solubly  together  and  with  the  same  common 
right  to  existence.  If  the  thing  is  real,  the 
form  is  real;  and  if  the  form  is  not  real,  the  thing 

is  not  real.. 

Or  to  put  it  into  a  still  simpler  form,  the  whole 
idealistic  argument  reduces  itself  to  this:  Be- 
cause an  effect  does  not  exist  independently  of 
its  cause,  therefore  it  does  not  exist  at  all.  Such 
reasoning  would  lay  waste  the  whole  universe 
of  thought. 


'  i 


364      THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 

(2).  Another  argument  is,  that  the  spatial  re- 
lations of  things  are  perpetually  changing  and 
therefore  space,  as  the  sum  of  these  is  perpetual- 
ly becoming  something  else.  The  answer  is  that 
space  is  not  a  piece  of  patch-work  made  of  an 
infinite  number  of  parts.  We  must  discard  all 
such  foolish  imagery  and  look  upon  space  scien- 
tifically as  that  upon  which  the  infinite  host  of 
spatial  abstractions,  forms,  places,  etc.,  depend. 
And  then,  surely,  it  will  be  evident  that  a  cause 
may  remain  eternally  the  same  while  its  effects 
are  incessantly  changing  because  they  are  also 
dependent  upon  other  conditions  which  are  in- 
cessantly changing. 

(3).  Beside  the  actual,  there  are  countless 
myriads  of  ideal  and  possible  space-relations 
which  things  might  have;  these  evidently  are 
subjective,  therefore  so  must  space  be,  since  it 
is  but  the  source  of  them.  But  how  utterly 
childish  this  appears  when  we  no  longer  regard 
space  as  a  sum  of  parts,  but  as  that  upon  which 
all  space  properties  depend!  For,  surely,  it  does 
not  detract  from  the  reality  of  a  cause  that  there 
are  '  'myriads  of  ideal  and  possible"  effects 
which  it  might  produce  under  different  condi- 
tions. 

The  Independence  of  Space.  Another  argu- 
ment of  Maya  idealism  is  that  the  reality  of 
space  would  involve  a  dualism  of  first  principles 


SPACE. 


365 


—two  independent  and  infinite  existences.  But 
what  compels  us  to  beliieve  that  space  is  abso- 
lutely independent?  Nothing  but  the  tacit  as- 
sumption— pervading  all  idealism — that  whatev- 
er is  dependent,  is  not  real.  But  that  assump- 
tion is  not  merely  baseless,  it  is  absurd.  For  if 
the  dependent,  the  effects  do  not  exist,  then 
causes  do  not  exist. 


X 


TIME. 


367 


IV. 

TIME. 

Much  of  what  has  just  been>  said  concerning 
space  appHes  to  time,  and  therefore  need  not  be 
repeated  in  this  brief  survey.  I  note  here  only 
a  few  neglected  facts  which  put  a  new  light  upon 
the  theory  of  Time. 

The  Pictorial  Process.  Nineteenth  century 
metaphysics  exhibits,  even  more  clearly  in  its 
discussions  about  time  than  elsewhere,  the  won- 
derful vigor  of  the  Fallacy  of  Resemblance  even 
under  conditions  that  would  seem  to  render 
it  impossible.  Space  readily  lends  itself  to  the 
uses  of  the  imagination;  nothing  is  easier  than 
to  think  of  space  pictorially,  as  an  airy  sort  of  a 
thing  capable  of  being  divided  into  parts  and  re- 
united into  a  whole  just  like  any  other  thing. 
But  the  surprising  peculiarity  of  Time  is  that  it 

absolutely  refuses  to  submit    to    this    picturing 
process.    There  are  no  possible  images  of  it  that 

do  not  manifestly  contradict  all  its  properties. 

But  despite  this  impossibility,  imagination 
does  manage  to  find  some  semblance  of  things 


wherewith  to  picture  time.     How?     Simply  by 
borrowing,  so  to  speak,  second-hand  images  of 
space  and    absurdly    trasferring    them    to  time. 
This  attempt  to    understand    time    by  means  of 
spatial  images   leads  to   queer   results.     For   in- 
stance, we  often  try  to  think  of  time  as  like  a 
moving  thing;  it  flows   like  a   stream,  etc.     But 
time  cannot  move  any  more  than  it  can  stand 
on  its  head;  present  time  is  not  "before"  us  for 
an  instant,  and  it  does  not  suddenly  dart  behmd 
us  to  become  past  time.    Or,  seeing  the  folly  of 
this  we  change  the  figure  and  think  of  time  as 
stationary,  as  a  straight  line  divisible  into  parts. 
Tliis  seems  better  as  being  more  abstract;  but 
proves  to  be  really  more  self-con;tradictory  and 
delusive.     For  the 'parts  of  a  straight  line  all  co- 
exist.   But  time  is  of  such  a  nature  that  only  the 
present  instant  exists;    the  past  has  become  ex- 
tinct and  the  future  does  not  yet  exist. 

The  quibbles  and  contradictions  resultant 
from  this  pictorial  view  are  too  familiar  to  need 
rehearsal  here.  But  note  now  the  use  that  mod- 
ern idealists  have  made  of  these  puzzles.  Seemg 
the  contradictions  and  absurdities  resulting  from 
the  attempt  to  find  out  what  time  ''looks  like," 
do  they  abandon  such  attempts?  Do  they  sim- 
ply draw  the  rational  inference  that  time  is  oi 
such  a  nature  to  preclude  all  picturing  of  it? 
No!  on  the  contrary,  they  proudly  present  these 


N 


368 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 


riddles  as  a  demonstration    that    time  does    not 
really  exist. 

Time  and  Temporal  Periods.  But  let  us  dis- 
card all  these  puerilities.  Instead  of  trying  to 
imagine  what  time  looks  like,  let  us  interpret  it 
simply  in  terms  of  cause  and  effect.  We  have, 
then,  temporal  periods — days,  hours,  instants, 
etc. — each  presented  in  our  conscious  experi- 
ence as  a  complex  effect.  Each  is  dependent 
partly  upon  our  ever  changing  experience  and 
partly  upon  the  continuity  and  oneness  of  time. 
To  the  latter  is  due  the  absolute  irreversiblenesss 
of  these  periods;  to  the  former  is  due  their  par- 
ticularity, their  capacity  for  being  analyzed — the 
days  into  hours,  the  hours  into  moments,  etc. — 
in  fine,  the  possibility  of  their  being  measured 
and  recognized  by  thought. 

Let  us  apply  this  insight  now  to  that  chief 
difficulty,  that  most  formidable  problem  in  the 
metaphysics  of  time  over  which  philosophy  was 
vexing  its  brains  as  hopelessly  two  thousand 
years  ago  as  during  the  last  century.  Every 
thinker  knows  the  problem  by  heart:  the  non- 
existence of  the  past  and  the  future,  the  present 
a  merely  subjective  boundary  line  no  more  real- 
ly existing  than  the  equator.  But  from  our 
present  point  of  view  the  problem  is  readily 
solved.  Temporal  periods  are  analyzable  into 
past,  present  and  future;  for,  they  are  abstracted 


TIME. 


369 


from,  partially  dependent  upon  and  always 
measurable  by  the  motions  of  things.  But  the 
time  upon  which  these  temporal  periods  also  de- 
pend is  indivisible.  It  is  not  a  thing,  a  com- 
pound, a  whole  constructed  out  of  its  parts.  On 
\he  contrary,  it  is,  even  more  evidently  than  in 
the  cognate  case  of  space— absolutely  one,  con- 
tinuous, indivisible.  We  may  indeed  properiy  in 
familiar  speech,  speak  of  time  past,  present  or 
future,  as  we  speak  of  the  ''rising"  and  the  "set- 
ting" of  the  sun.  But  none  the  less,  time  is 
indivisible,  contmuous,  without  gaps,  atomic 
structure  or  other  semblance  of  a  thing. 

The  problem  of  time,  then,  is  simply  dust, 
which  philosophy  has  thrown  into  its  own  eyes 
by  its  attempts  to  imagine  what  time  looks  like. 
The  obscuration  disappears  when  we  think  ra- 
tionally—not  metaphorically— of  time  as  that 
upon  which  temporal  periods  depend. 

Time  and  Interaction.  But  perhaps  the  old 
cavil  will  still  be  urged.  Time  does  not  interact 
with  things.  It  is  merely  a  condition,  not  the 
real  and  ''efficient"  cause  of  their  motions.  But 
what  does  science  claim  to  know  about  this  mys- 
tic ''influence,"  this  "dynamic  efficiency"  sup- 
posed to  pass  from  body  to  body  and  to  thus 
produce  their  motions?  Absolutely  nothing  ex- 
cept the  persistence  of  its  quantity  through  all 
apparent  transformation.    And  this  persistence  is 


370         THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 

determined  solely  by  the  invariable  conditions  of 
Space  and  Time.  So  that  space  and  time  seem 
to  be  the  ultimate  conditions  upon  which  mov- 
ing things  depend  not  merely  for  a  place  and 
time  to  move  in,  but  also  for  all  we  really  know 
about  those  mystic  influences  which  are  alleged 
to  be  their  only  true  and  efficient  causes. 


V. 


PERCEPTION. 

Compulsory  Beliefs.     Let  it  be  fully  understood 
at  the  out-set  that  we  shall  make  no  appeal  to 
any     merely    alleged    irresistibleness    of    belief. 
Reason,  as  I  have  said  elsewhere,  is  too  divine  to 
be  compelled;  it  will  listen  only  to  reasons.     In 
fact,  an  irresistible  belief  in  this  sense— a  behef 
which  we  are  mysteriously  compelled   to   accept 
by  something  inherent  in  our  mental  structure 
or  constitution— is    an   impossibility.    The  very 
fact  that  this  belief  is  unaccountably  forced  upon 
us,  excites  the  suspicion  of  its  being  merely  sub- 
jective    We  doubt  it  because  we  are  thus  com- 
pelled to  believe  it.       Kant   taught   this  to   the 
world,  although  the   teacher    seemed  sometimes 
hardly  conscious  of  what  he  was  teachmg. 

Hence  thet  Scottish  philosophy,  with  its  lavish 
appeals  to  common-sense,  irresistible  beliefs,  etc., 
failed  utterly  to  find  any  real  guarantee  for  ob- 
jective existence.  There  is  a  vein  of  almost 
whimsical  irrationality  running  through  it.  What 


;fff* 


372        THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 

could  be  worse,  for  instance,  than  its  plea  that 
perception  was  •'immediate,"  despite  the  im- 
mense  and  complicated  mass  of  mediation  which 
so  evidently  intervenes  between  the  object  per- 
ceived and  the  perceiving  intellect.  No  wonder 
that  Sir  Wm.  Hamilton  was  driven  to  the  strange 
device  of  imagining  the  soul  as  somehow  seated 
in  both  eyes  and  there  inspecting  the  pictures 
painted  upon  the  two  retinas. 

Discarding,  then,  all  appeals  to  intuition,  irre- 
sistible  beliefs,  etc.,  the  question  of  reality  nar- 
rows itself  to  this:  How  do  we  know  that  an 
outer,  spatial  world  exists?  My  ultimate  answer 
to  this  question  will  prove  to  be  a  very  simple 
one.  But  before  its  full  force  can  be  appreciated, 
It  is  necessary  to  exhibit  the  sources  of  the  con-* 
fusion  and  perplexity  which  have  so  long  en- 
veloped this  theme. 

The  Fallacy  of  Resemblance.      That  a  thought 
should  resemble  a  thing  is  an  evident  absurdity, 
an  utter  impossibility;     And  yet  there  is  hardly 
any  proposition  which  has  come  much  nearer  to 
being  accepted  by  all  philosophers  as  a  ''univer- 
sal and  necessary  truth'^  than  the  proposition  that 
our  ideas   of    things   must  be  like  their  objects. 
Especially  has  modern  philosophy  made  constant 
use  of  this  preposterous  proposition  as  the  enter- 
ing wedge  of  skepticism.    Locke  began  the  work 
by  discovering  that  our  ideas  of  secondary  quali- 


PERCEPTION. 


373 


ties  could  not  be  resemblances  of  what  really  ex- 
ists in  bodies,  although  primary  qualities  possi- 
bly might  be.  Berkeley  developed  this  hint  into 
his  celebrated  idealism.  He  shows  that  ihe 
primary  qualitites  are  in  the  same  plight  as  the 
secondary  ones;  points  out  the  contradictions  in- 
volved "in  supposing  things  like  unto  our  ideas 
existing  without;"  and  concludes  therefrom  that 
corporeal  substances  do  not  exist.  Hume  argues 
in  the  same  strain.  Kant  carefully  points  out  as 
the  inmost  distinction  of  his  philosophy  that  he 
does  not  regard  the  space  idea  as  quite  ''similar 
to  the  object,"  any  more  than  he  believes  that 
"the  sensation  of  red  has  a  similarity  to  the  prop- 
erty of  vermilion  which  in  one  excites  this  sen- 
sation." (i)  And  so  with  Spencer,  in  fact  with 
all  idealistic  or  agnostic  writers — never  have  I 
found  one  who  did  not  sooner  or  later  disclose 
the  true  basis  of  his  skepticism  as  lying  in  the 
impossibility  of  ever  finding  out  whether  our  per- 
ceptions really  resemble  the  things  perceived. 

But  we  have  now  passed  far  beyond  that  ab- 
original point  of  view.  We  see  that  there  is  not 
the  slightest  need  that  a  thought  should  be  like 
the  object  which  it  makes  known  to  us.  Think- 
ing is  not  some  mystic  process  of  interior  pho- 
tography. A  thought  is  a  means,  an  instrumental 
condition  for  the  disclosure  of  an  object.     But  it 

(1)    Kant.    ProUoomfna.  13.    Remark  II. 


i 

pip™ 


II 


374         THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 

is  no  more  requisite  that  a  thought  in  order  to 
perform  its  functions,  should  be  Hke  the  object 
than  that  an  axe  should  be  like  the  log  which  it 
splits  or  that  a  toothache  should  resemble  the 
tooth  that  causes  it. 

Up  to  this  point  I  have  presented  but  a  merely 
negative  aspect  of  the  theory  of  perception.  A 
perception,  whatever  it  may  or  may  not  be,  is 
certainly  not  a  picture.  And  if  the  reader  fully 
grasps  even  this  purely  negative  view,  he  will  be 
surprised  to  find  how  much  of  the  bewilderment 
and  contradiction  of  current  epistemology  is  es- 
caped. 

But  something  more  than  this  merely  negative 
view  must,  of  course,  be  given.     Otherwise  we 
should  seem  to  be  accusing  the  great  thinkers  of 
the  race  of  utter  imbecility  in  having  thus  insist- 
ed upon  what  was  self-evidently  impossible  and 
absurd— viz.,  that  thoughts  should  resemble  their 
objects        But  this   insistence  was   due  not  to 
pure  folly,  but  to  a  logical  demand  for  some  in- 
sight into  the    method  of    knowledge.     How,  it 
was    asked,  can  a    thought    give    us    any    valid 
knowledge  of  a  thing,  if  the  one  does  not  corre- 
spond to  or  somehow  resemble  the  other?    But 
evidently  the  required  correspondence  or  resem- 
blance between  the  idea  and  its  object  could  be 
secured  only  by  stripping  the  object  of  every  spa- 


PERCEPTION. 


375 


tial  quality — that  is,  of  all  that  was  essentially 
characteristic  of  things.     Hence,  idealism. 

A  False  Viciv  of  Abstraction.  For  a  typical  ex- 
ample of  this  let  us  take  the  teachings  of  Berke- 
ley. Impartial  readers  can  hardly  help  being 
puzzled  by  that  author's  serene  and  confident  as- 
surance that  things  are  only  "ideas."  That  to 
Berkeley  seems  to  be  an  axiom,  self-evident,  in- 
disputable. And  if  his  axiom  be  conceded  the 
rest  of  his  philosophy  naturally  becomes  very 
easy.  Things  being  only  ideas,  of  course  they  do 
not  exist  independently  of  the  mind.  The  es- 
sence of  being  is  to  be  perceived ;  the  world  does 
not  exist  when  no  one  is  looking  at  it.  Even 
"the  vulgar"  understand  by  reality  nothing  but 
a  regular  succession  of  ideas  in  their  minds.  And 
so  on  and  on,  until  th'e  mystified  reader  begins  to 
suspect  some  malformation  either  in  Berkeley's 
brain  or  his  own. 

But  the  trouble  is  not  so  serious  as  that.  Berk- 
eley is  simply  the  victim  of  a  defective  and  de- 
lusive view  of  abstraction.  To  see  that  it  is 
necesary  to  clearly  understand  what  an  abstrac- 
tion is. 

To  abstract,  as  we  have  seen,  in  the  section 
upon  judgment,  is  to  relate  a  cause  and  an  effect. 
The  object  and  its  attribute  are  not  split  apart 
as  with  a  hatchet ;  the  one  is  not  even  subtracted 
from  the  other.     But  there  is  an  analysis  con- 


376 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


PERCEPTION. 


377 


joined  with  a  new  synthesis;  the  attribute — mo- 
tion, for  instance— has  b^en  abstracted  from  and 
yet  is  never  to  be  considered  as   really   separate 
from  or  independent  of  its  object.    There  is  also 
a  second  essential    characteristic  of    an  abstrac- 
tion, its  complexity;  it  is  dependent  not  only  up- 
on the  object  from  which  it  has  been  abstracted, 
but  also  upon  other  causes  external  to  the  object; 
it  is  indeed   this    secondary   dependence  which 
gives  to  the  abstraction  that  wonderful  wealth  of 
meaning  and     power  whereby     it  becomes  the 
means  of  binding  things  with  things  in  that  vast 
network  of  causal  relations  revealed  by  science. 
But  to  avoid  confusion,  let  us  provisionally  ig- 
nore this  secondary  dependence.     Let  us  fix  our 
attention  upon  its  primary    indefeasible    depen- 
dence upon  the  object  abstracted  from.    That  at 
least  is  indisputable.     Any  attempt  to  think  of 
motion  or  any  other  abstract  as  having  a  really 
independent  existence  of  its  own,  would  i)e  a  sure 
sign  of  insanity. 

Now  Berkeley,  and  idealists  in  general,  do  not 
indeed  deny  this  dependence;  that  would  be  ab- 
surd. But  they  burrow  und^r  the  fact  and  un- 
dermine it.  They  think  of  these  abstracts — attri- 
butes, motions,  qualities — as  somehow  having  a 
vague,  independent  existence  of  their  own;  the 
object  abstracted  from  is  to  them  nothing  but  the 
sum  of  these  airy  abstractions.    Thinking  thus,  it 


is  but  a  short  step  to  the  idealistic  conclusion. 
These  abstractions  detached  from  all  reality, 
floating  in  the  void,  elusive  and  evanescent — 
what  more  natural  than  to  regard  them  as  merely 
"ideas?"  For  do  not  "ideas"  have  the  same 
ghostly  and  ephemeral  nature? 

Thus  Berkeley  and  all  other  idealists — misled 
by  a  defective  view  which  misses  the  most  essen- 
tial characteristic  of  the  abstracting  process- 
find  it  easy,  even  necessary,  to  believe  that  things 
are  only  "ideas."  They  are  the  victims  of  a 
mental  mirage  which  presents  only  abstractions, 
hanging  in  mid-air,  unsupported  and  turned  up- 
side down. 

Substance  arid  Attribute.  Of  similar  origin  are 
the  follies  that  have  gathered  around  the  con- 
ception of  substance  and  attribute.  What  can  be 
more  grotesque  than  the  idea  of  attributes  "in- 
hering" or  sticking  in  a  substance  like  pins  in  a 
pin-cushion?  Or  of  the  substance  as  a  mysteri- 
ous, imperceptible  substrate  hidden  beneath  the 
attributes?  How  determined,  too,  each  term  in 
this  strange  relation  seems  to  be  to  annihilate  its 
correlate;  the  substance,  we  are  told,  is  but  the 
sum  of  its  attributes;  and  the  attributes  are  but 
mere  abstractions. 

But  if  we  interpret  the  two  correlates,  not  in 
ligures  of  speech,  but  in  terms  of  cause  and  ef- 
fect, ihe  perplexity  disappears.     When    we    ab- 


<  ikil:  i 


^1 


378 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


PERCEPTION. 


379 


stract  an  attribute  from  an  object  we  do  not  di- 
vide them  from  each  other  or  spHt  them  apart. 
On  the  contrary  we  bring  them  together,  we  re- 
late them  as  cause  and   effect.     Even  if 'we  ab- 
si- acted  a  thousand  attributes  from  a  given  sub- 
stance, the  substance   would   remain  unimpaired 
and  undinilnished,  and  the  attributes  lose  noth- 
nig  of  their  reality  in  the  process  of  being  ab- 
stracted.    In  fine,  the  relation  of  substance  and 
accident  is  the  complete  vindication  of  our  funda- 
mental law  of  knowledge;  neither  cause  nor  ef- 
fect can  be  known  or  even  thought  dissevered 
from  its  correlate.       A  substance  without  attri- 
butes would  indeed  be  a  deep  mvstery.    And  an 
attribute  without  a    substance    would  be  a  still 
deeper  one.    But  unite  the  two  in  causal  relation 
and  each  instantly  illumines  the  other. 

Composite  Pictures.  Some  thinkers  have  found 
in  a  recent  photographic  invention  a  new  means 
of  explaining  and  making  plausible  the  ancient 
theory  of  abstraction  as  onlv  a  picturing  of  re- 
semblances.  General  ideas,  it  is  aserted,  are  pro- 
duced  in  some  such  way  as  that  in  which  a  pho- 
tographer produces  a  "composite  picture  ''  Im- 
ages of  different  individuals  are  mechanically 
blended  or  fused;  their  differences  are  obliterat- 
ed, a  common  type  appears. 

But  these  pictorial  philosophers  seem  to  entire- 
ly overlook  the  fact  that  composite  pictures  are 


impossible  except  when  the  resemblance  is  very 
great  and  the  differences  almost  indiscernible. 
Portraits  vary  but  slightly  in  their  outlines,  and 
hence  are  readily  fused  into  a  common  likeness. 
But  who  would  attempt  a  composite  picture  of  all 
triangles  or  of  all  motions?  Or  of  all  animals  or 
plants?  Or  even  of  the  arithmetical  digits?  Mo! 
the  formation  of  general  ideas  does  not  consist 
in  the  mere  effacement  of  differences.  Every  at- 
tempt to  explain  abstraction  as  solely  a  tracing 
of  resemblances  must  end  in  the  confusion  and 
perplexity  so  characteristic  of  our  modern  phi- 
losophy. 

The  Complexity  of  Effects.  Another  superabun- 
dant source  of  idealistic  error  is  the  neglect  of 
the  scientific  common-place  that  effects  are  com- 
plex.   Discerning  that  the  object  perceived  is  not 
sufficient  by  itself  to  produce  the  effect,  the  ideal- 
ist gravely  announces  that  it  is  not  necessary  at 
all  for  the  production  of  the  effect  and  does  not 
Because  colors,  for  instance,  are  dependent  not 
exist!     The  effect  is  merely  a  mental  creation, 
solely  upon  colored  objects,  but  also  upon  aether 
waves,    nerve    motions,    cerebral    centres,    etc. 
therefore  colored  objects  are  needless.     Because 
the  effect  is  consummated    by    the    abstracting 
mind,  therefore  it  is  independent   of   everything 
else. 

I  shall  waste  no  time  upon  argumentation  of 


380 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


that  type.     Let  us  rather  note  that  insight  into 
the  complexity  of  effects  dispells    that    appear- 
ance  of  deceptiveness  in  perception  which  has  al- 
ways been  the  real    stronghold    of    skepticism. 
The  stationary  appears  to  move,  for  instance,  if 
we  fail  to  take  in  account  that  essential  factor' in 
all  observation,  the  position  of     the  spectator. 
The  very  large  appears  very  small,  if  we  fail  to 
take  mto  account  that  essential  factor  in  all  per- 
ception of  magnitudes,  the  intervening  distance 
And  so  everywhere    scientific    insight  into  the 
complexity  of  effects  vindicates  the  truthfulness 
and  exactitude  of  perception  instead  of  reducing 
It  to  such  a  process  of  "phenomenality"  and  illu- 
sion, as  idealism  imagines. 

The  Kantian  Doctrine  of  Phenomenality.     This 
doctrine  is  the  elaborate  systematization  of  what 
has  always  been  a  favorite  conception  of  minds 
of  a  mystical  cast.     It  conceives  of  the  world  as 
a  dream  which  all  men  are  somehow  mysterious- 
ly compelled  to  dream  throughout  their  earthly 
Jives.     Here,     again,     the     fallacy     of     resem- 
blance   is    evidently    at    work;    it    is    an    at- 
tempt   to    explain    reality    by    likening    it    to 
a     dream,     a     hallucination     or     some     other 
product  of  involuntary  imagination.     But  what  I 
wish  to  show  is  that  this  Kantian    doctrine  of 
phenomenality,  plausible  as  it  may  seem  to  the 
thoughtless,   is  absolutely    inconceivable.      It  is 


PERCEPTION. 


381 


devoid  of  something  without  which  even  dreams 
would  be  impossible.  It  lacks  an  element  of  san- 
ity which  is  inseparable  even  from  a  madman's 
ravings. 

For,  let  it  be  noted  that  Kant's  doctrine  of 
"phenomenality"  makes  not  the  least  provision 
for  any  genuine  causation.  No  more  than 
Hume,  can  he  find  any  real  bond  of  connection 
between  either  things  or  ideas.  There  is  nothing 
more  than  a  subjective  necessity  of  imagining 
causal  relations  which,  instead  of  guaranteeing 
discredits  their  reality.  Note  further  this  fact 
which,  so  far  as  known  to  me,  has  been  hitherto- 
fore  overlooked:  Sense,  understanding,  reason 
in  Kant's  view  of  them,  sink  far  below  the  level 
of  the  imagination  in  its  craziest  moods.  No 
matter  how  monstrous  may  be  the  illusions  pre- 
sented to  the  dreamer  or  the  madman,  yet  tha 
bond  of  causal  connexion  between  them  is,  real; 
they  do  not  come  at  random;  they  unfold  one 
from  another  with  as  rigid  a  continuity  as  do  the 
movements  of  the  stars.  But  in  the  Kantian 
world  of  phenomenality  nothing  is  real.  The  in- 
terdependence of  the  phenomena  is  just  as  illu- 
sive as  the  phenomena  themselves.  Causation  is 
merely  a  subjective  necessity — a  dream  about 
dreatns.  Order  and  invariableness  are  equally 
illusive,  since  both  Space  and  Time  are  non-ex- 
istent.   In  fine,  each   phenomena,  each   evanes- 


\^. 


882        THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 

cent  idea,  is  absolutely  isolated,  comes  really  at 
random,  is  really  without  any  connection  with 
the  rest.  Compared  with  this  the  madman's 
world   is  a  cosmos. 

Let  then  the  idealist  think  intently  upon  this 
unassailable  distinction.  Let  him  cease  to  prattle 
about  ''fixed  order,"  "invariable  succession,"  etc., 
after  he  has  by  his  hypothesis  converted  such 
words  into  symbols  of  mere  delusion  and  un- 
reality. Then  he  cannot  but  see  instantly  that 
phenomena  in  his  sense  of  the  term  are  abso- 
lutely unknowable.  They  have  not  even  that  de- 
gree of  intelligibility  which  attaches  to  the  products 
of  the  imagination. 

Nor  can  the  idealist  escape  by  throwing  Kant 
overboard  like  another  Jonah.     None  of  Kant's 
successors  have  made  any  better  provision  for 
the  order   and   interdependence   of    phenomena 
than  he  did.  In  Hegel  especially,  causation  was 
but  a    provisional,    inadequate,  "self-annulling" 
phase  of  thought— to  be  left  behind  as  the  notion 
moved  on  toward  the  Idea.    That,  indeed,  is  the 
fatal  error  of  all  Post-Kantian  idealism.    As  has 
been  abundantly    shown    in    the    Philosophy  of 
History,  the  essence  and  life  of  the  idealistic  im- 
pulse is  its  emphasis  upon  causality.    The  dogma 
of  "Maya"  or  "transcendenal  illusion"  is  but  an 
accident,  a  disease  to  which  idealism  is  peculiarly 
susceptible.     Post-Kantian    idealism    has   flung 


PERCEPTION. 


383 


away  the  essence,  the  life,  but  kept  the  accident, 
the  disease. 

Finally,  the  dogma  of  "phenomenality"  renders 
all  real  knowledge  impossible  by  destroying  the 
distinction  between  truth  and  falsehood.  Its 
teaching  is  that  an  enormously  successful  lie  is  a 
kind  of  truth,  and  the  only  kind  of  truth  of  which 
we  have  any  genuine  knowledge.  But  that  is  high 
treason  against  good  morals  as  well  as  reason. 
It  puts  all  human  knowledge  of  existence  upon 
a  lower  level  than  the  hallucinations  of  the  mad- 
man. For,  first,  it  exploits  the  former  as  being  a 
more  universal,  gigantic  and  irresistible  impos- 
ture than  the  latter;  secondly,  it  denies  to  our 
human  world-view  that  element  of  truthfulness 
which  is  to  be  found,  as  we  have  shown  in  the 
preceding  paragraph,  even  in  the  ravings  of  the 
insane. 

The  Demand  for  Unity.  The  more  one  exam- 
ines the  grounds  on  which  the  doctrine  of  the 
world's  ideality  rests,  the  more  he  is  surprised  at 
their  inadequacy  and  airiness.  Hence  we  in- 
stinctively feel  that  there  must  be  some  weightier 
reason  for  this  long  persistence  of  a  paradox  that 
seems  to  hang  upon  such  a  brittle  thread  of  ar- 
gument. There  have  been,  perhaps,  several  such 
reasons,  but  chief  among  them  is  the  demand  for 
unity.  The  human  mind  demanded  that  even  in 
the  pre-scientific  age;  and  now  more  than  ever. 


S84 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


PERCEPTION. 


88b 


'  ttii  t 


But  philosophy  has  sought  this  unity  by  a  wrong 
method—through  the  fallacy  of  resemblance,  by 
ignoring  the  differences  and  magnifying  the  like- 
ness of  the  objects.  Thus  comes  materialism  cry- 
iny  thoughts  are  but  pale  copies  of  things;  and 
also  idealism  crying  that  things  are  but  ^'exter- 
nalized"  pictures  of  thoughts.  But  instead  of 
umty  we  get  thus  only  endless  contention  over 
what  is  really  little  more  than  a  question  of  nom- 
enclature. 

The  only  true  unity  is  the  unity  of  dependence. 
Objects    the    most    diverse—even    things  and 
thoughts— may  be  related  as  cause  and  effect  •  in 
fact,  ihey  are  thus  being  related  in  every  moment 
Of  genuine  thinking.    There  is  no  need  of  pain- 
fully paring  down  either  of  these  contrasted  ele- 
ments into  a  delusive  similitude   of   the    other. 
There  is  need  of  gradually  disentangling,    by  a 
strict  scientific  method,  the  immense  complex  of 
causal  relations   until   we    reach   that    Ultimate 
Unity  on  which  all    else   depends.     This  is  the 
-only  sane  monism. 

The  Ultimate  Doubt.  We  have  thus  examined 
—in  this  section  and  the  two  preceding  ones  up- 
on Space  and  Time— the  arguments  for  modem 
or  agnostic  idealism,  and  traced  them  all  back  to 
t  few  primary  errors  into  which  the  human  intel- 
lect  seems  very  prone  to  fall.  So  far  as  positive 
arguments    are    concerned,    agnostic    idealism 


seems  to  have  no  standing-ground;  any  positive 
proof  or  even  indication  of  the  world's  "phenom- 
enality"  appears  to  be  lacking. 

But  there  still  remains  a  negative  argument, 
venerable  and  formidable.  Must  not  all  our 
knowledge,  it  will  be  asked,  ultimately  rest  upon 
some  unverifiable  assumption?  And  does  not 
every  asumption  carr>'  with  it  some  suggestion, 
some  probability  of  its  deceptiveness  even 
though  there  may  be  no  proof  or  even  indication 
thereof?  And  does  not  this  ultimate  dubiety  at- 
tach itself  especially  to  the  senses?  May  not  per- 
ception after  all  prove  to  be  merely  a  universal 
dream?  Could  not  Infinite  Power  produce  our 
sensations,  each  in  its  order,  without  the  inter- 
vention of  a  spatial  world  and  organs  of  sense? 

I  begin  my  answer  to  these  questions  by  point- 
ing out  that  no  real  knowledge  is  based  or  can 
be  based  solely  upon  an  unverifiable  assumption. 
And  under  that  term  must  be  included  all  such 
nondescript  phrases  as  ''self-evident  truths,"  "in- 
tutions,"  irresistible  beliefs,  etc.;  for,  they  differ 
only  in  name;  no  new  certainty  is  gained  by  the 
easy  process  of  declaring  a  given  proposition  to 
be  "self-evident."  No  real  knowledge,  then, 
can  be  based  upon  an  assumption.  This 
wide  prevalence  of  a  contrary  opinion  is  but 
a  survival  from  a  pre-scientific  age,  when  induc- 
tion was    misunderstood    and    when    reasoning 


i( 


rt 


386 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


PERCEPTION. 


387 


.4 


meant  only  a  deducing  of  some  proposition  from 
a  more  universal  one,  and  that  from  a  still  wider 
one,  and  so  on  up  to  "self-evident  truths,"  or  un- 
verifiable  asumptions.  But  we  now  know  that 
knowledge  begins  with  inductions;  and  that  the 
starting-point  of  an  induction  is  not  an  assump- 
tion. 

Precisely  in  this  inductive  way  we  began.  The 
proposition  that  all  thinking  was  a  relating  of 
cause  and  effect  was  set  forth  as  something  to 
be  proved  by  an  inductive  examination  of  the 
various  processes  of  thought.  And  we  have 
found  that  every  form  of  mental  activity — per- 
ceiving, abstracting,  conceiving,  judging,  the 
simplest  inference,  the  most  universal  of  scien- 
tific inductions,  the  recognition  of  Space  and 
Time — has  for  its  essence  the  establishment  of 
some  causal  relation.  Eliminate  the  causal  ele- 
ment from  any  act  of  thinking  and  it  loses  forth- 
with all  its  meaning,  its  life.  Thus  a  wonderful 
interrelation,  a  common  kinship,  is  proved  to  ex- 
i§t  between  all  activities  of  thought.  All,  from 
the  simplest  and  most  rudimentary  to  the  high- 
est and  most  complex,  are  found  to  be  but  more 
or  less  developed  forms  of  a  single  process. 

Through  this  inductively  established  principle 
we  hope  to  give  a  final  answer  to  the  question 
above  presented.  In  other  words,  it  is  this  soli- 
darity of  thought  which  renders  doubt  concern- 


ing the  reality  of  the  spatial  world  logically  im- 
posible.    Let  us  see. 

The  Final  Argument.  My  thesis  is  this. 
Thought  is  so  interrelated  that  the  negation  of  the 
spatial  world  logieally  involves  the  negation — the 
eollapse  and  extinetion  of  all  thinking.  The  dem- 
onstration thus  becomes  that  known  to  all 
mathematicians  as  the  reductio  ad  absurdum. 
There  is  a  difference,  indeed,  but  one  that 
serves  only  to  give  a  greater  potency  and 
sweep  to  our  argument.  The  geometer  shows 
that  the  negation  of  his  theorem  leads  to  the 
overthrow  of  some  accepted  principle  of  thought. 
Here  it  is  to  be  shown  that  the  negation  of  the 
spatial  world  logically  leads  to  the  overthrow  not 
merely  of  some  particular  principle,  but  of  all 
principles  of  thought — to  the  collapse  of  all 
thinking. 

(i).  To  begin  my  argument,  the  first  fact  to 
be  proved  is  that  we  have  no  knowledge  of  any 
particular  perception  apart  from  our  knowledge 
of  the  object  perceived.  Of  course,  the  average 
psychologist  will  wave  this  affirmation  aside  with 
a  derisive  smile.  He  has  always  been  in  the 
habit  of  claiming  the  most  transparent  knowl- 
edge of  his  thoughts  apart  from  everything  else. 
All  his  teachers  and  books  have  been  quite  unan- 
imous upon  that  point.  Concerning  his  knowl- 
edge of  external  existence  he  is  modest  enough; 


38S 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


PERCEPTION. 


389 


:'1  . 


but  for  him  no  other  spot  was  ever  so  brightly 
illumined  as  that  which  he  calls  his  "field  of  con- 
sciousness." And  yet  if  he  will  think  intently  in- 
stead of  blindly  following  the  ruts  of  tradition,  he 
cannot  but  see  instantly  that  there  is  no  possible 
knowledge  of  perceptive  thoughts  apart  from 
knowledge  of  objects  perceived. 

For  asuredly  to  know  an  object  we  must  know 
at  least  some  of  its  attributes.  But  the  peculiar- 
ity of  sensations  or  perceptions  is  that  they  have 
no  distinctive  attributes  of  their  own,  known  to 
us.  We  distinguish  a  particular  sensation  from 
all  others,  not  by  its  own  attributes,  but  by  means 
of  the  attributes  of  the  object  revealed  by  that 
sensation.  For  instance,  is  the  sensation  of  heat 
itself  hot?  Or  the  sensation  of  roundness,  itself 
of  a  round  shape?  Or  when  the  sensation  of  red 
"rises  above  the  threshold  of  consciousness/'  is 
it  painted  of  a  red  color?  Or  does  the  interior 
sensation  of  a  mal-odorous  substance  itself  have 
a  bad  smell?  Such  questions  seem  almost  silly 
iirtheir  simplicity.  And  yet  a  clear  apprehension 
of  the  answer  to  them  would  work  miracles  of 
renovation  in  our  modern  psychology.  At  least 
it  wuld  prove  to  all  what  is  here  being  contended 
for:  to-wit,  that  there  is  no  possible  knowledge 
of  our  particular  sensations  apart  from  a  knowl- 
edge of  their  objects. 

(2).    Even  those  great  groups  into  which  sen- 


sations are  divided  can  be  discrimmated  from 
each  other  only  in  the  way  above  described.  We 
distinguish  between  sensations  of  sight,  sound, 
smell,  etc.,  through  attributes  either  of  their  ob- 
jects or  else  of  the  organs  of  sense  definitely  lo- 
cated in  space,  never  through  any  non-spatial  at- 
tributes of  the  sensations  themselves.  The  latter 
remain  and  must  ever  remain  shrouded  in  mys- 
tery. 

It  may  be  objected  that  we  can  discriminate 
between  feelings  of  pain  and  of  pleasure  without 
reference  to  any  spatial  quality.  But  that  excep- 
tion serves  only  "to  prove  the  rule."  For  per- 
ception proper  occupies  the  neutral  ground  be- 
tween pain  and  pleasure;  whenever  either  of 
these  feelings  is  very  intense,  the  perceptive  func- 
tions are  retarded  and  impaired. 

(3).  Perceptions  and  spatial  objects  perceived 
are  so  closely  interrelated  that  without  knowl- 
edge of  the  latter,  there  is  no  posible  knowledge 
of  the  former ;  and  that  for  the  simple  reason  that 
perceptions  have  no  discernible  attributes  of  their 
own  by  which  they  can  be  discriminated,  known, 
or  even  thought.  That  proved  the  remainder  of 
our  task  is  easy.  For  perceptioons,  as  we  have 
seen,  are  the  primary  units  out  of  which  reason 
develops  all  its  other  processes.  By  memory  we 
simply  recall  what  was  once  perceived;  by  imag- 
ination ,  voluntary  or  involuntary,  our  memories 


!i 


390 


THE   PHILOSOPHY    OF  HISTORY. 


are  combined;  by  abstracting,  judging,  reason- 
ing, we  analyze  and  re-unite  what  was  given  in 
perception.  So  strict  is  the  inter-relation  be- 
tween all  our  mental  activities.  Hence  we  con- 
clude that  if  the  negation  of  the  spatial  object 
logically  involves  the  negation  of  the  perceptive 
act,  it  also  involves  the  negation  of  all  other 
mental  processes.  The  whole  fabric  of  thought 
dissolves. 

(4).  Carefully  note,  however,  that  our  argu- 
ment refers  only  to  the  spatial  attributes  of  ob- 
jects. Science  is  now  fully  convinced  that  all 
merely  qualitative  relations  are  derivative  from 
and  reducible  to  spatial  or  quantitative  ones,  al- 
though it  has  not  yet  completed  their  reduction. 
Therefore  our  task  here  is  much  simplified.  We 
have  to  prove  only  of  the  spatial  attributes  thai 
their  cancellation  would  make  all  knowledge  im- 
possible. 

The  splendid  genius  of  Kant  divined  that  the 
problem  of  Space  was  the  key  to  all  metaphysics. 
But  perplexed  by  the  obscurities  enveloping  the 
space-idea,  he  worked  out  the  easier,  skeptical 
solution  of  the  problem  which  led  to  nothing  but 
nineteenth  century  agnosticism.  But  against 
this  view  we  have  now  raised  an  impassable  bar- 
rier. Every  attempt  to  prove  the  ideality  of  the 
spatial  world  has  been  shown  to  stultify  itself 
—  from  the  start.     For,  it  makes  thoughts   even 


PERCEPTION. 


391 


more  delusive  and  unknowable  than  things.  In 
nullifying  the  spatiality  of  the  object  it  takes 
away  the  only  means  of  discriminating  one 
thought  from  another.  Thus  reason  is  converted 
into  chaos.  Questions  concerning  existence  or 
non-existence,  truth  or  falsehood  become  absurd. 
Thinking  has  been  rendered  logically  impossible. 
The  Appeal  to  Cotiseiousness.  Do  you  then  re- 
pudiate, it  may  be  asked,  that  testimony  of  con- 
sciousness which  gives  so  clear  an  insight  into 
our  mental  operations?  No!  but  I  repudiate 
that  worn-out  trick  of  proving  sheer  assumptions 
by  alleging  that  we  are  conscious  of  them. 

Such  disingenuous  follies  do  indeed  seem  to  be 
bringing  consciousness  into  disrepute  with  many. 
One  of  the  most  eminent  of  American  psycholo- 
gists wrote  a  few  years  ago:  (i)  **Every  one  as- 
sumes "that  we  have  direct  introspective  ac- 
quaintance with  our  thinking  activity  as  such. 
Yet  I  must  confess  that  for  my  part  I  cannot  feel 
sure  of  such  a  conclusion."  But  there  is  no  need 
of  going  to  that  extreme.  In  fact,  the  very  thesis 
we  have  just  been  contending  for,  instead  of  ig- 
noring consciousness,  rather  defines  it  and  de- 
scribes its  real  functions.  As  the  fine  philological' 
instinct  of  the  race  divined  in  framing  the  word, 
ra;/sciousness    is   concomitant    knowledge.       In 


(J)    James.    Pychology.    (B.  C.)  p.  467     Also  p.  215  216. 


392 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


every  perceptive  act,  for  instance,  knowledge  is 
gained  of  some  object  perceived  and  along  with 
it  a  collateral  knowledge  of  the  mental  operation 
of  perceiving.  Take  away  the  first  and  the  col- 
lateral knowledge  vanishes  of  course.  And  that 
is  largely  the  gist  of  our  thesis:  cancel  the  spa- 
tial object  and  knowledge  of  thoughts  is  render- 
ed impossible. 


VI. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 

Nowhere,  perhaps,  has  the  fallacy  of  resem- 
blance had  such  scope  as  in  speculations  con- 
cerning self-consciousness.       The  difference  be- 
tween the  two    rival  theories  upon    this  subject 
seems  to  reduce  itself  entirely  to  a  choice  of  met- 
aphors.    On  the  one  side  we  have  the  party  of 
Hume,  who  describes  consciousness  as  a  series 
of  ideas,  a  flowing  ''stream"  of  thoughts.      That 
simile  throws  not  one  ray  of  light  upon  the  sub- 
ject;   rather  it  seems  to  be  devised  for  the  special 
purpose  of  concealing  everything  characteristic 
of  our  consciousness.      The  figure  of  a  flowing 
stream  as  we  have  seen,  is  misleading  even  when 
applied  to  a  succession  of  events  in  time;  but  far 
more  so  when  the  essence  of  each  event  is  to 
remember  the  rest.      On  the  other  side,  we  have 
the   Post-Kantian   philosophy  teaching  another 
doctrine,  but  by  precisely  the  same  metaphysical 
method.      Thus  in    Hegel's  view,  exclusive  em- 
phasis is  laid  upon  the  self,  that  is,  the  ego,  "the 
Idea"  externalizing  itself.     But  when  is  an  idea 
inside  and  when  outside  itself  or  anything  else? 


394 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


So  self  is  pictured  as  opposite  to  and  confronting 
itself,  like  a  maiden  admiring  her  image  in  a  mir- 
ror. And  then  after  a  while  space  itself  is  inter- 
preted as  this  opposition  between  the  ''empty 
subject"  and  an  "empty  object."  Thus  the  met- 
aphor works  both  ways:  first,  consciousness  is 
explained  by  a  supposed  analogy  to  space,  and 
then  space  is  interpreted  by  a  supposed  analogy 
to  consciousness. 

But  we  have  now  passed  beyond  this  pictorial 

philosophy.     We  interpret  consciousness  not  by 

metaphors,  but  in  terms  of  cause  and  effect.    To 

be  conscious  is  to  be  aware  of  the  causal  relation 

'between  the  thinker  and  his  thought. 

And  here  our  fundamental  law  of  knowledge 
vindicates  itself  grandly.  First,  we  can  know 
the  cause  only  through  its  effects ;  the  ego  by  it- 
self is  but  a  half-thought,  elusive,  non-descript; 
in  vain  we  try  to  see  what  it  looks  like,  to  de- 
scribe it  as  a  simple  substance,  to  interpret  it 
piclorially;  it  can  be  known  only  by  its  effects, 
by  what  it  docs.  Ignorance  of  this  fact  led  to 
Kant's  mistake  when  he  declared  the  self  to  \A 
"the  emptiest  of  all  notions,"  or  when  he  en- 
tered upon  his  famous  but  futile  tilt  against  the 
soul,  conceived  by  him  as  ''a  simple  substance" 
or  thing.  Precisely  the  same  mistake  is  made  by 
hosts  of  people  who  doubt  because  they  cannot 
discover  where  the  soul  is  and  what  it  looks  like. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 


395 


But  conversely  effects  can  be  known  only  when 
related  to  their  causes;  thoughts  without  a  think- 
er are  unintelligible,  nonsensical.  Ignoring  this 
is  the  mistake  of  Hume  and  his  followers,  who 
interpret  their  thoughts  as  a  "stream."  Thoughts 
without  a  thinker  are  abstractions  abstracted 
from  nothing;  they  are  like  attributes  without  a 
substance  or  notions  detached  from  moving 
things. 

By  thus  reasoning,  not  in  metaphors  but  in 
terms  of  cause  and  effect,  we  have  certainly  made 
some  headway  in  disentangling  the  perplexities 
investing  the  subject  of  self-consciousness.  But 
our  task  is  but  begun.  Thoughts  are  dependent 
upon  a  thinker;  but  w^e  have  found  them  to  be 
also  dependent  upon  the  spatial  world.  And  it 
is  needful  to  know  something  of  the  relation  be- 
t^veen  these  two  factors  which  co-operate  to  pro- 
duce human  experience.  Let  us  try  to  thus  com- 
plete our  theory. 

The  Antithesis  of  Feeling  and  Thought.  The 
pivot  of  any  true  theory  of  consciousness,  it 
seems  to  me,  must  be  the  following  distinction: 
The  process  of  feeling  and  that  of  thought  are 
exactly  antithetical.  Feeling  is  automatic;  its 
only  function  is  to  bind  like  to  like  according  to 
the  well  known  laws  of  Association ;  without  con- 
scious effort,  by  a  process  as  purely  mechanical 
as  the  growth  of  an  organism,  present  sensations 


396 


THE   PHILOSOiPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 


397 


are  fused  with  past  experiences.  But  thought, 
cri  the  contrary,  is  a  conscious  eflFort  to  arrest 
this  automatism,  to  rise  above  the  mere  spontane- 
ity of  suggestion,  to  abstract,  to  judge  ,to  dis- 
cover causal  relations,  instead  of  yielding  to  the 
blind,  mechanical  flow  of  associated  feelings. 

The  tendency  among  experimental  psycholo- 
gists has  been  to  ignore  this  antithesis,  to  see 
only  resemblance  between  feelings  and  thoughts. 
M.  Binet  especially  has  shown,  with  great  skill 
and  power,  the  close  parallelism  between  the 
structure  of  a  syllogism  and  the  fusion  of  present 
sensations  with  past  images  which  is  constantly 
taking  place  in  all  animal  life.  He  wishes  to 
prove  the  virtual  identity  of  the  reasoning  pro- 
cess with  this  fusion  of  images;  and  yet  he  can- 
not wholly  hide  from  himself  their  essential  dif- 
ference. This  idle  flow  of  associated  images,  as 
we  see  it  in  dreams  or  revery,  making  the  oddest 
leaps  and  the  queerest  conjunctions,  is  certainly 
something  very  different  from  the  steady,  unde- 
viatrng  march  of  reason  towards  its  conclusions. 
M.  Binet  confesses  it  w^ith  admirable  candor. 
"How  does  it  happen,"  he  asks,  "that  these  ideal 
recollections  are  not  reasonings  although  they 
have  their  structure?  To  tell  the  truth,  I  do  not 
know."    (i). 

The  truth  is  that  he  has  throughout  his  work 

(1)    Binet.    The  rnyehohtgy  of  Reasoning.    174. 


mistaken  the  nature  of  logical  inference.  The 
syllogism  is  not,  as  the  ancient  Greeks  imagined, 
the  type  of  reasoning.  On  the  contrary  it  is  but 
a  subsidiary  process  for  interpreting  and  apply- 
ing the  knowledge  already  gained  through  in- 
duction. Its  work  is  so  entirely  mechanical  that 
machines  can  do  it  as  unerringly  as  human 
minds,  (i).  There  is  no  need,  then,  of  being  sur- 
prised at  the  close  correspondence  between  the 
syllogism  and  the  automatic  process  which  Na- 
ture has  devised  for  all  animal  sentiency. 

Furthermore,  this  supposed  analogy  is  very 
vague  and  far-fetched.  But  even  if  it  were  ten- 
fold closer,  than  it  really  is,  it  could  not  hide  the 
opposition  between  thinking  and  the  mere  asso- 
ciation of  feelings.  Thought  dissolves  what  asso-  • 
ciation  unites :  for  the  blind  automatic  suggestion 
of  similarities  it  substitutes  the  search  for  causal 
relations.  Almost  every  page  of  this  essay  has 
shown  the  opposition  between  the  two  processes. 

The  Functions  of  Consciousness,  (i).  This 
antithesis  between  thought  and  feeling  is  further 
proved  by  a  scrutiny  of  consciousness.  For,  first, 
there  would  be  no  need  of  consciousness  if  think- 
ing consisted  merely  in  automatic  or  mechanical 
association.  More  than  that  it  would  be  a  posi- 
tive impediment,  preventing  ease  and  rapidity  of 
performance.    Common  experience  shows  that  to 


(i)     Jevons,    Logic.     199. 


398 


THE   PHILOSO'PHY   OF   HISTORY. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 


399 


be  true  of  all  movements  which  at  first  have  to  be 
learned  by  conscious  effort  but  afterwards  be- 
come automatic  or  unconscious.  But  no  one 
learns  to  think  unconsciously.  On  the  contrary^ 
the  more  we  keep  every  step  of  the  proces  clearly 
and  consciously  before  us,  the  better  our  think- 
ing. 

(2).  Another  most  familiar  fact  is  our  experi- 
ence of  the  immense  cifori  required  to  really 
think.  Despite  our  best  endeavors  the  mind  sud- 
denly shoots  off  into  some  by-path  of  associa- 
tion. Children  are  notoriously  thoughtless;  and 
the  vast  majority  of  men  soon  give  up  the  at- 
tempt to  think  as  altogether  too  laborious.  The 
reason  is  that  to  think  requires  a  complete  re- 
versal of  the  natural  tendency  which  we  share 
with  other  animals.  That  tendency  is  to  let  our 
sensations  and  memories  link  themselves  sponta- 
neously together  according  to  the  mechanical 
laws  of  similarity. 

(3^.  For  the  same  reason  thinking  is  never 
continuous.  As  finite  beings,  we  are  too  easily 
swept  off  our  feet  by  the  under-tow  of  our  animal 
existence.  And  therefore  in  its  struggle  against 
the  blind  automatism  of  the  unconscious, 
thought  requires  the  aid  of  language.  Those 
who  assert  that  there  can  be  no  thought  without 
words  are  probably  mistaken;  at  least  it  seems 
possible  to  perform  some  of  the  simplest  acts  of 


judging  or  abstracting  without  the  aid  of  speech. 
But  evidently  these  acts  are  too  volatile  to  avail 
much  in  the  hard  struggle  of  thought  to  maintain 
itself  against  the  automatism  of  feeling.  There- 
fore thought  needs  the  aid  of  words,  not  merely 
for  purposes  of  communication,  but  as  symbols 
giving  fixedness  and  persistence  to  our  ideas, 
which  are  created  with  difficulty  and  vanish  with 
ease  into  the  stream  of  associated  sensations  and 
memories. 

(4).  This  activity  of  thought  controls,  partially 
at  least  ,the  lower  automatic  activity,  arrests  it, 
reverses,  reconstructs  and  transforms  it.  Con- 
stant experience  proves  this  fact  of  control,  and 
it  is  needless  to  enter  here  into  the  details  of  the 
proof.  My  design  is  to  show  that  in  this  now 
completed  view  of  the  essential  distinction — the 
contrariety,  even — between  thoughts  and  the 
stream  of  animal  sentiency  we  have  the  first 
dawn  of  a  scientific  psychology. 

The  Basis  of  Psychology.  For  thousands  of 
years  the  darkest  of  all  dark  questions  has  been 
that  of  the  relation  of  the  thinker  to  his  thoughts. 
Even  Oriental  philosophy,  otherwise  a  marvel  of 
unity,  split  upon  that  point.  And  the  chief  source 
of  this  perplexity,  apparently  increasing  instead 
of  diminishing,  seems  to  be  the  failure  to  inquire 
what  thinking  really  is.  That  unknown,  much 
knowledge  concerning  the  thinker  could  hardly 


400 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF   HISTORY. 


be  expected.  Yet  philosophy  has  never  seriously 
propounded  to  itself  the  question:  What  is  the 
nature,  the  essential  function  of  thinking? 

The  result  is  that  there  has  never  been  any 
precise  line  of  demarcation  drawn  between  the 
activities  of  the  conscious  self  and  those  of  the 
physical  organism.  Self  has  been  vaguely  con- 
ceived as  some  recollective  force  binding  togeth- 
er the  disconnected  moments  of  experience.  But 
animals  also  rem^ember:  even  the  minutest  of  the 
micro-organisms  do.  They  seem  to  have  other 
traces  of  consciousness  also;  they  are  aware  of 
their  pleasures  and  pains,  they  discriminate  be- 
tween spatial  relations,  they  apparently  exercise 
choice,  (i)  And  if  a  single  cell  of  protoplasm  can 
accomplish  all  this,  what  specific  function  or  rea- 
son for  existence  is  left  for  the  psychical  self  as 
distinguished  from  the  physical  organism? 

But  we  have  now  established  a  precise  line  of 
demarcation,  even  an  essential  opposition  be- 
tween the  activity  of  the  conscious  self  and  the 
stream  of  animal  sentiencv.  This  activitv  is  re- 
vealed  in  all  human  experience  as  a  transforming 
and,  in  a  certain  sense,  creative  power.  It  is  the 
effort  to  control  the  mechanism  of  passivity,  to 
convert  sensations  into  reasoned  perceptions,  to 
exalt  feeling  into  emotion,  to  transmute  causes 


(i)     Binet.     The  Psychic  Life  of  Micro-orKanisms,  by,  78.  109,  et  al. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 


401 


into  means  and  results  into  final  causes,  to  create 
a  cosmos  within  out  of  materials  blindly  provided 
from  without.  Such  an  activity  is  unknown  to 
other  animals,  and  of  it,  therefore,  the  physical 
organism  cannot  furnish  even  the  hint  of  an  ex- 
planation. 

The  agent  of  this  unique  actiyity,  this  effort 
to  think,  is  the  thinker,  the  will  to  know,  the  con- 
scious self. 


/ 


VII. 

THE  CONSCIOUS  CAUSE. 

We  have  already  proved  that  the  essence  of 
modern  scientific  induction  as  distinguished  from 
vulgar  empiricism,  consists  in  its  new  conception 
of  force  or  energy  as  a  causality  acting  with  ab- 
solute invariability  for  the  production  of  the  mo- 
tions of  the  universe.  At  fir^t  this  conception 
was  but  a  mere  hypothesis.  It  was  an  exceeding- 
ly doubtful  hypothesis  also.  Some  phenomena 
manifested  a  certain  degree  of  uniformity-  but  the 
most  seemed  to  show  nothing  but  incessant  vari- 
ation. But  with  the  discovery  of  the  first  two 
laws  of  motion  this  hypothesis  began  to  be  dem- 
onstrated little  by  little.  And  the  whole  gist  of 
modern  scientific  progress  may  be  said  to  lie  in 
the  gradual  verifying  of  this  hypothesis  of  inva- 
riableness  and  the  applying  of  it  to  ever  widening 
circles  of  phenomena,  until  now  it  has  become 
that  universal  law  known  as  the  Conservation  of 
Energy. 

But  an  enormous  error  has  always  dogged  the 
heels  of  this  great  scientific  movement.  That  er- 
ror is  the  assumption  that  what  has  been  demon- 


• . 


\ 


THE  CONSCIOUS  CAUSE. 


403 


strated  concerning  force  or  energy — causality 
conceived  as  limited  to  one  unvarying  mode  of 
action — must  be  true  concerning  all  causation; 
in  other  words,  that  such  a  limitation  is  somehow 
necessarily  inherent  in  the  very  nature  of  a  cause. 
This  assumption  pervades  modern  speculation 
through  and  through.  It  is  the  root  of  Kant's 
celebrated  antonomies.  It  is  pervasive  in  all  nine- 
teenth century  idealism  which,  absorbed  in  the 
paradox  of  "phenomenality,"  lost  all  true  ideal- 
istic insight  into  causality.  And  yet  upon  its 
very  face  it  shows  itself  as  an  utterly  unverifiable 
assumption.  .Certainly  finite  experience  can  nev- 
er verify  so  vast  a  conclusion  as  that  all  causes 
are  necessarily  limited  to  one  invariable  manner 
of  action.  Even  "intuition"  cannot  help  us  here; 
for  that  certainly  cannot  be  a  universal  and  nec- 
essary truth  which  had  never  been  heard  of  three 
hundred  years  ago. 

Evidently  this  assumption  is  another  case  of 
the  fallacy  of  resemblance,  of  mere  analogical 
reasoning.  Just  as  forces  are  pictured  as  things 
somehow  secreted  within  other  things,  so  caus- 
ality is  pictured  as  something  like  these  mystical 
forces  and  acting  accordingly.  But  discarding  all 
this,  let  us  once  more  appeal  to  our  Fundamental 
Law  of  Knowledge.  Instantly  two  transparent 
and  indubitable  facts  emerge. 

The  first  fact  is  that  there  is  nothing  contradic- 


4(M 


THE   PHILOSClPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


tory  in  the  idea  of  a  dependent  cause,  of  a  thing 
that  is  a  cause  in  one  relation  and  an  effect  in  an- 
other relation.  Some  philosophers  have  indeed 
marvelled  over  this,  but  it  is  hard  to  understand 
why.  It  seems  no  more  mysterious  than  the 
fact  that  a  man  may  be  at  once  a  father  and  a 
son. 

The  second  and  equally  obvious  fact  is  that 
every  idea  of  a  dependent  cause  has  implicit  in  it 
the  idea  of  an  independent  cause.  Otherwise  all 
causal  relationship  would  be  subverted.  MarV 
further  that  this  implicitness  is  not  a  mere  hy- 
pothesis deduced  through  some  difficult  regress 
to  the  infinite.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  a  fact  evi- 
dent upon  bare  inspection  of  inert  things  as 
science  has  taught  us  to  regard  them;  it  is  made 
obscure  only  by  that  fallacy  of  resemblance 
which  leads  so  many  to  conceive  of  forces  as  act- 
ual entities,  like  things  and  hidden  inside  of  them. 

The  TJicisfic  Argument.  The  above  view,  I 
think,  shows  the  validity  of  the  once  famous  *'on- 
tological  argument"  from  the  Idea  of  God  to  His 
Existence.  That  argument,  insufficiently  stated 
by  the  pre-scientific  philosophy  of  the  Middle 
Ages  and  much  ridiculed  since,  is  in  its  essence, 
profoundly  true.  Kant's  witty  criticism  of  it — 
that  the  idea  of  "a  hundred  thalers  in  my  pocket" 
does  not  prove  their  actual  existence  there — has 
been  received  with  unbounded  applause.     But, 


THE  CONSCIOUS  CAUSE. 


40& 


really,  the  blinded  Samson  of  modern  philosophy 
was  in  that  only  making  sport  for  the  Philistines. 
His  reply  has  no  logical  force;  for,  there  is  an 
utter  disparateness  between  the  two  cases  which 
he  treats  as  analogous.  The  idea  of  God,  of  free, 
unlimited  Causality,  differs  from  all  other  ideas 
in  this  one  respect,  that  it  is  implicit  in  them  all. 
Therefore,  if  the  idea  of  God  is  illusory,  every 
other  possible  idea  is  also  illusory — a  mere  shell  of 
words  enveloping  a  delusion.  And  if  all  ideas 
are  illusory,  nothing  exists;  all  thinking  suffers 
instant  collapse.  Thus  we  have  again  reached 
the  logically  impassable  barrier  which  reason 
throws  across  the  path  to  skepticism. 

The  ontological  argument,  therefore,  despite 
all  ridicule,  will  stand.  Every  thought  of  things 
or  forces  or  of  dependent  causality  in  any  other 
form,  logically  involves  the  thought  of  some 
free,  uncoerced  causality.  Every  act  of  true 
thinking,  as  distinguished  from  the  merely  spon- 
taneous flow  of  associated  feelings,  has  implicit 
in  it  the  idea  of  God.  Every  such  act  of  thinking 
is  literally  an  act  of  worship. 

The  cosmological  argument  is  but  a  corollary 
to  the  ontological  one,  rightly  understood.  The 
criticism  against  it  may  easily  be  traced  back  to 
the  error  considered  in  the  first  part  of  this  sec- 
tion— the  asumption  that  causality  cannot  be  in- 
dependent, but  must  always  act  with  absolute  in- 


406 


THE   PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


variability.  Physical  science  has  indeed  proved 
that  all  motions  follow,  without  a  shadow  of 
variableness,  from  their  causes.  But  to  assume 
that  their  primary  cause  must  produce  effects 
thus  and  only  thus,  is  utter  unreason.  It  is  not 
only  unwaranted,  but  it  subverts  the  very  idea  of 
causality  and  thus  makes  all  thinking  impossible. 
In  fine,  it  is  the  ubiquitous  fallacy  of  resemblance 
again ;  merely  imagining  that  causes  must  bt :  like 
their  effects  ,  it  argues  that  because  the  effects 
are  necessitated,  therefore  their  causes  must  also 
be  necessitated.  And  yet  upon  this  wanton  as- 
sumption all  pantheism  reposes. 

Analogy  of  Divine  and  Human  Activity.  We 
have  before  confessed — even  boasted — that  our 
conclusions  were  but  th-e  logical  setting  forth  and 
verifying  of  what  the  human  mind  has  always 
vaguely  divined.  This  is  pre-eminently  true  in 
regard  to  that  argument  from  the  analogy  of  di- 
vine and  human  activity  upon  which  theistic 
faith  has  mainly  rested  and  which  even  doubters, 
like  Kant  and  Mill,  have  received  with  favor. 
That  argument  we  fully  accept;  only  we  lift  it 
from  the  level  of  a  mere  analogy  to  that  of  a  true 
induction. 

Induction,  as  we  have  seen,  does  not  ignore 
difference  and  reason  from  mere  resemblance 
alone.  But  it  accounts  for  the  difference,  quanti- 
tatively if  it  can ;  and  thus  develops  so  far  as  pos- 


THE  CONSCIOUS   CAUSE. 


407 


sible     the    vague  resemblance  into  sameness  or 
identity.     Let  us  follow  this    inductive    method 
here.    For  the  dim  analogy  between  the  making 
of  a  watch,  for  instance,  and  the  creation  of  a  uni- 
verse, let  us  substitute  that  exact  correspondence 
which  science  has  discovered  between  divine  and 
human  thinking.     "O  God!"    cried    Kepler,  *'l 
think  Thy  thoughts  after  Thee."   In  other  words 
there  is  no  essential  diversity  or  opposition  be- 
tween the  finite  and  the  infinite  Reason.     True, 
the  former  is  interwoven  with  error;  but  that  is 
because  our  human  thinking  is  intermittent,  diffi- 
cult, yielding  readily  to  lower  impulses  and  sug- 
gestions, and  thus  ever  lapsing  into  unreason.   In 
fine,    the   difference   is  purely  quantitative — the 
difference  between  the  interrupted  energ\'  of  the 
finite  and  the  continuous,  unlimited  energy  of  the 
Infinite. 

The  Reigfu  of  Law.  But  there  is  a  still  closer 
correspondence  between  the  activities  of  the  hu- 
man and  the  divine  will.  Both  are  the  outcome 
of  obedience  to  self-imposed  laws  of  reason  and 
righteousness.  To  speak  of  the  Infinite  as  being 
compelled  from  without  to  yield  such  obedience, 
would  be  manifestly  absurd.  And  that  man  also 
is  very  far  from  being  compelled  to  yield  this 
obedience,  is  too  painfully  evident  from  all  his 
history.  It  is  hardly  needful  to  add  that  here  also 
the  difference  between  the  divine  and  the  human 


"T?:'--' 


;S;t. 


408 


THE  PHILOSOPHY   OF  HISTORY. 


is  purely  quantitative.  The  conformity  of  the 
Infinite  to  moral  law  is  continuous  and  eternal; 
that  of  man  is  fitful,  interrupted  by  frequent 
lapses. 

Note,  however,  that  even  these  human  varia- 
tions do  not  in  the  least  interfere  with  the  univer- 
sal reign  of  law.  If  man  thinks — in  what  we  have 
seen  to  be  the  only  full  and  true  sense  of  that 
term — he  freely  conforms  to  those  higher  laws 
upon  which  all  the  lower  laws  depend.  If  he 
ceases  to  think,  if  he  does  not  will  to  control  the 
mechanism  of  impulse  and  suggestion,  he  yields 
himself  to  the  dominion  of  their  mechanical  laws. 
In  either  case,  the  reign  of  law  is  not  for  an  in- 
stant broken. 


^. 


'.  *:-.; 


'-■■-.:i  ''^s 


/ 


f 


tii 


I 


^* 


,! 


^i: 


\ 


N 


